Alex Lowe on Software and Startups

You need information; news, entertainment, research, or something else. Traditional media has become more corporatized and influenced by advertising dollars and politics. The web is following suit with major players bubbling to the top, advertisers directing content, and search empires telling us where to go. Blogs have been touted as the grassroots solution for free and unfiltered information. Is it true?

Unfortunately, I don’t think blogs are as grassroots as we think. The blogosphere is not set up to be egalitarian, it is set up for competition. The blogosphere is a competitive landscape between publishers, viewers, and advertisers. These elements are common with traditional media; media many consider corrupted. And it’s these common elements that will lead to the corruption of the blogosphere. And it’s already begun.

A few of the problems:

• Blog searches use voting systems of pingbacks just like PageRank. These systems cause certain sites to bubble to the top and stay there.
• Pay per post services. These services pay people to write content and to link to other pages.
• Advertisers paying for product reviews. Self explanatory.
• Advertisers driving content, indirectly. Write the correct content, key words and key phrases and you’ll get popular ads on your sites.
• Search Engine Marketing. Again, write the correct key words and key phrases and you’ll get better search engine placement.
• Advertising networks that have sprung up to join blogs under a single banner.