the ‘blogosphere’ is a horrible atrocity
So I was just looking into the wordpress api stuff, trying to help a guy in #wordpress figure out how to do something, and I got distracted, leading me ultimately to the topic at hand…
Ran into some other wp2 documentation. Which, in turn, ran into syndication stuff, which ran into syndication services.
I’ve heard of these for a while … technorati, feedburner, etc. Didn’t really think too much about them.
So I just looked at them. Yep, I looked briefly at all of the 20 or so that wordpress’s recommended service “ping-o-matic” pings.
Some of them I found immediately useless. The very first one was inundated with very blatant spamblogs. Things with domains like “1greatblog58″, titles “sometitle” and post content consisting of long lists of links.
That seemed to be the norm. All of these places publishing their own APIs, getting abused by spamblogs. This is a world I wasn’t really graphically aware of, and had thus far been able to ignore.
So, the few exceptions that weren’t dominated by spamblogs were dominated by random stupid crap. And while I’ve got nothing in particular against random stupid crap (having posted quite a bit of it myself), I can’t even BEGIN to believe that people think that the random stupid crap they’re posting has such a wide appeal that it needs to appear on twenty different feed-search services.
It completely boggles the mind. I mean … I’m an egotistical bastard, and I don’t even think that the crap I write holds the remotest interest to a million random strangers on the net.
More to the point, how do these places make money? What’s their business model? I mean … like, wordpress itself is a loose open-source community, that has no business model. But the rss indexers? Who advertises on these things? Who uses them? Who actually likes them?? SERIOUSLY!
I … don’t get it. While I keep what amounts to an online notepad of random scribbles that I occasionally share with other people, I think I’ve just developed a new sense of pride in not identifying with or participating in the ‘blogger community’ at large. And I’m not coming from a “philosophy of negation” thing (like beatniks, goths and hipsters, trying to be on the outside), I’m simply feeling sheer revulsion at what I just saw that so many people are heralding as — among other things — both journalism and the future of communication.