Use the blog, Luke

The collective future of blogs lies not in dethroning the New York Times -- but in becoming a force that can make sense of the Web's infinity of links.

By Steven Johnson

May 10, 2002 | Nearly eight years after Justin Hall uploaded his first hypertext diary entry, weblogging has finally hit the mainstream. Everyone seems to have a published opinion on this not-so-new new thing, and if the attention seems a little belated, it's not undeserved.

After all, a number of significant developments separate us from pioneering sites like Links From the Underground or Robot Wisdom: The blogging population itself has grown dramatically, and has begun organizing itself into a genuine community rather than a series of isolated sites; software tools have been built specifically to let noncoders create and maintain blogs; and the universe of potential pages to link to has expanded by several orders of magnitude since Hall launched his site. There's simply more Web to log, and consequently more need for experienced guides.

Then there are the high-profile migrations: print journalists like Mickey Kaus, Virginia Postrel and Andrew Sullivan, who have managed to enhance the mainsteam credibility of the blog genre, while simultaneously exploring new business models. (With some genuine success -- Sullivan says he is now breaking even, and his new book-club feature has made him an Oprah-style kingmaker on Amazon.com.) Just as it did five years ago with the Web zine world, the appearance of old-journalism celebs has triggered a wave of articles and Op-Eds, debating the merits of this new form. Thus far the debate has centered on whether blogs constitute a new model of journalism or simply a minor variation on an existing theme: an Op-Ed page with more links and fewer fact checkers.

But the debate is a false one. What makes blogs interesting is precisely the way in which they're not journalism. Sure, if more writers can follow in Sullivan's wake and turn their blogs into revenue-generating enterprises, blogs will certainly mark a qualitative change as far as the underlying economics go. (Effectively it will mean that bloggers have a new, usually modest revenue stream to supplement what they take home from their day jobs.) But the journalistic form itself won't be all that earth-shattering, certainly no more revolutionary than the first-generation Web zines, which were often staffed like old-style print magazines, but sported hypertext, multimedia and genuine community interaction alongside those traditional mastheads.

The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers have the potential to do something far more original than offer up packaged opinions on the news of the day; they can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed "vanity sites," the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google.

As it happens, the bloggers already function as a kind of kitchen cabinet for Google's relevancy ranking algorithm. Google measures relevancy by determining how many other pages link to a given page -- the more people point to your "Remington Steele" tribute site, the more likely it is that Google will recommend it to someone searching for info on '80s detective shows or Pierce Brosnan or Henry Mancini theme songs. Those pointers are themselves ranked by Google: If a lot of highly linked-to pages link to your page, you'll rise even higher in the rankings.

You'd be hard-pressed to design a system that gave the blogging community a greater impact on Google's results. Because bloggers by definition link far more than your average Web page, and because they also tend to link to each other's sites (most blogs feature a now standard list of comrades in their margins), a page that attracts the attention of a few bloggers will quickly shoot up the Google rankings. Do a search on Larry Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" -- a hit with the blogging community -- and a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week. (Or at least it did the last time I checked; Google rankings are hardly set in stone.)

This is the Blogger Effect. It's what happens when the arbiters of relevance in the "attention economy" shift toward a bottom-up structure. Google thinks pages are relevant now not just because they've received the imprimatur of Condé Nast or the New York Times, but because they caught the interest of Sopsy and friends.

Now, that's good news if you like Sopsy more than you like, say, Howell Raines. But if you can't stand Sopsy, or you've no idea who he/she/it is, then it's a little bit disturbing that the site is skewing your Google rankings. There are significant political consequences to the Blogger Effect: Because the blogging community contains a disproportionate number of libertarians, it's possible that Google searches on certain hot-button issues will start skewing toward libertarian-friendly pages. Given Google's increasing prominence, this libertarian slant could prove to be more significant than the more familiar concerns about liberal bias in the major networks, and conservative bias on Fox News. No sensible person thinks "The O'Reilly Factor" is free of political slant (save O'Reilly himself). But the great oracle of Google is supposed to be above such partisan concerns.

The solution is not to eliminate the bloggers from Google. The solution is to create more Googles. Or, even better, to transform the data generated by the bloggers into something that rivals what Google does -- to extract some new kind of collective wisdom out of a universe of armchair opinion leaders.

Think about those bloggers pointing to Sopsy and causing the site to rise in the Google rankings: Are they providing a journalistic function with those links? On some level, perhaps. But they are also doing something closer to information management, more librarian or archivist than Woodward and Bernstein. The bloggers are helping Google learn what pages should be connected to other pages, or to particular text strings. They are helping Google transform the Web from a disorganized mess into a more coherent universe of useful data. But their contributions to this noble cause have been limited to date, partially because the bloggers themselves have been too busy boxing with the phantoms of traditional journalism.

Next Page: Blogs could be a guardian angel, hovering over your shoulder as you Web surf

• View blog reactions