Who Killed Conversations?
Long, long ago in 2003, Miles Burke was mourning the Lost Art of Conversation and wondering how it could be encouraged. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Online forums, the natural home for conversations, seem to have a questionable future as John Carcutt points out. There certainly is a decline in conversations as opposed to chats and instant messages.
As we will show, there are two main reasons for this happening. The first is a natural phenomenon, while the second is a result of actions by one major player. The natural phenomenon is that the Internet brings with it incredible connectivity. Everyone can connect with everyone, provided they choose to do so. If they wish, they can also broadcast to the world in real time any significant happenings in what some call their Life Stream.
The Life Stream
One of the oldest and most popular is Twitter. Your life can be recounted in a series of short (140 characters) Tweats (newslets) to any of your friends who are watching. It certainly is difficult to have a meaty discussion in such short tweats. Somewhat ironically, a Twitter competitor Jaiku, now owned by Google, is titled Your Conversation. It will shortly be open to all and describes itself as your own microblog.
Perhaps the best illustration of the nature of these life streams is provided by another newcomer, Plurk. Its display looks very much like a river.
As time passes, we move downstream to the left and see the comments of those we have chosen to follow. It’s almost like logs floating down a river. If you wish you can jump onto such a log and add your own comment. It can be amusing but it’s hardly a conversation.
Many are finding this plethora of social media where you can stay connected is overwhelming. Merely staying in touch can eat up a great deal of time. There’s hardly any time left to have any meaningful conversations. This is the natural phenomenon that we talked about.
Google’s First Blow To Conversations
Google is a powerful influence in the way things happen on the Internet. It has taken two major initiatives that have affected both the quantity and quality of the conversations that were occurring. The first is that its highly successful keyword search algorithm gives a major weighting to (hyper)links that point to web pages. Since this was widely known, this opened the floodgate to spammy comments on blogs seeking only to be given a link back to the author’s web page. This was so prevalent that some blog owners would block all comments to avoid this. Overall the Google algorithm has caused a significant reduction in the average quality of web conversations.
Google’s Second Blow to Conversations
The second Google initiative was a natural follow-on to their first. Noting that many website owners would pay others to create links to their websites, Google wished to block this. So they introduced the NoFollow tag. They insisted that anyone who created a page link to another web page for monetary gain should mark that link with the NoFollow tag. In this way, the search robots would disregard the link and it would count for nothing in the keyword search algorithm. The merit and efficacy of this approach for treating paid links could certainly be questioned.
What is more questionable is then using this NoFollow tag in a blanket way to devalue all comments on blogs. Spam comments on blogs are indeed a problem. Google suggested that it should be applied to all blog comments. Wordpress now adopts this as the default position. However unless there is some incentive for a genuine commenter to add a useful comment, it is unlikely to happen. As noted earlier, the flood of new social media leaves little time to add a blog comment that may be read by very few. Another approach is needed here.
Fighting Back With DoFollow
David Harry has pointed out the absurdity of this approach in his Monday morning rant this week.
It is a sad statement on the times
It?s a damned funny preposition really if we think about it. At its core Google is a nodal/link based algorithm that depends largely on the links of the web to establish popularity and to a certain degree, value. Now, what if?. by some strange twist of fate, the majority of the world?s webmasters and site owners decided to Nofollow all of their outbound links in a sort of, ?better safe than sorry? manoeuvre?
If more worthwhile conversations are to be encouraged on the Web, then some different approach is needed. If comments are to be accorded links, then there must be a strong process in place to avoid giving value to worthless posts created only for links. Many are now adopting this approach and you can find some of these listed in the following:
Tougher Love For Blog Commenters
This Dofollow policy has been running for the SMM blogs for two months now and there has been a very slight increase in the spam comments. Perhaps too many are assuming that comments of little value to subsequent readers will be acceptable. You might assume that from what Digerati Marketing says about its Over 160 Relevant Link Following Blogs.
Even for white hatters, I don?t think there?s an ethical issue here. So we?re putting our comment there for the sole purpose of getting a link, yes. However, if the blog author can read this comment and they think it adds value to the post, where?s the harm in that? If bloggers are so concerned about who they are giving their link juice to, they should be using the nofollow attribute in the first place.
The SMM policy sets out to deliver best value to our readers. Unless a blog comment is helping that aim, it will be deleted. Merely leaving the blog comment there with a NoFollow tag is the worst of all possible approaches.
Related:
We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links
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BPWrap
June 11th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Hiya Barry…. nice stuff and tnx for the luv – nothing I like more than a link text with ‘rant’ in it…lol… gotta love it!
I certainly am never afraid to nuke a comment that smells of a dive by link drop that’s for sure – BUT I also won’t nofollow them… to be honest I only use them when linking out to a potential ‘bad nieghbourhood’.
I don’t sell links, thus I feel that is the ONLY use I need it for. I thought that was what it is for? Not to ‘play it safe’? If legitimate webmasters start to use it… then there will actually be more networked linkspam links out there in comparison to legitimate links since the good peeps are afraid to show ANY link love…. it could be troubling.
Google may have started it, but who perpetuates it? We do…. sigh….
oh well… back to work tnx for the post and mention – U forgot to mention that I didn’t in ANY WAY pay you for it…. bwaa ha ha ha ha
June 16th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Hi, I’m the author of DigeratiMarketing. While I think it’s ironic that there’s only 1 comment here, I just wanted to point out a few things that have been overlooked..
For instance, “…won?t nofollow them? to be honest I only use them when linking out to a potential ?bad nieghbourhood?. ”
How do you know when you’re linking to a bad neighbourhood then? Do you change you user-agent or referrer when checking the page that’s being linked to? Do you inspect the information in the header? If not, then it would be quite simple for me to dupe you into linking anywhere I wished.
Just nofollow your comments and be safe, there are thousands of blogs with nofollow with great followings. Tbh, all user-generated content should be nofollowed.
June 16th, 2008 at 6:43 am
Mark, thanks for presenting the counter-argument. In some ways it’s ironic that you would have that view-point while producing the list that you do. Clearly your approach is the easy way out. However I’m always upset when the actions of a few can spoil the way things work for the many.
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:36 am
Good to hear. I’m very sick of nofollow. As far as I am concerned, nofollow is a giant carpet Google threw over its mess. When I say mess, I mean PR. They should have never publicly displayed the crutch to their algo.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:41 am
Really interesting post, thank-you.
I totally agree that Google has had this impact on web conversations but I also think that they steer more people into potential conversations too, for example I found this blog post via searching.
I think the sheer amount of blogs and forums on the net is also a bit of a conversation killer, people simply cannot be bothered to filter the good stuff out of the bad.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:06 am
It is a shame that most forum/blog posts are pointless oubursts of spam or keyword bulging SEO posts. Perhaps when robots are intelligent enough we can have interesting conversations with them instead. But for the moment, something needs to be put in place to stop spam and generate discussion.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am
I think that the dofollow is a great idea, as long as people keep a check on it responsibly and don’t let any spam on their sites then it can only be a good thing, mick..