This searing Register article by Andrew Orlowski takes aim at Dave Winer, blogging, bloggers, and the overall labeling of the process of having your own weblog. It starts with a comment from Atrios here asking: Who’s Dave Winer?

Sorry Atrios, but I knew who Dave Winer was, but I didn’t know who you were. And no, I don’t expect you to know who I am. I do find it amusing though when people base their position on something on knowing who somebody is, as if jumping up and down proclaiming: do you know who I am? like this is really going to matter? I am not accusing Atrios of this, he (she?) is just asking a question. However, Mr. Orlowski takes what Atrios says to go off on a more wild tangent:

But on what grounds does Dave Winer, backed up by a small circuit of adoring journalists and fellow webloggers, have to uphold his right to fleece them for real bucks? (Sometimes the journalists are weblog evangelists and HTML coders themselves, which raises all kinds of tantalising conflict-of-interest questions we shall return to in due course).

First, Dave Winer: I don’t know the guy personally, never met him, never sent him email (although I’m going to send my very first email to him with this weblog entry), but I have his weblog linked on this site because I’ve found that he tends to link to interesting and/or useful things at his weblog. I (would) link to anybody else website, blog, or whatever they want to call it if I found/find it provided regularly interesting, timely and/or useful/helpful content. The fact that he seems to have opinions that ruffle feathers on occasion is of little consequence to me, so sorry, get over it, Winer-haters. When and if he should ever attack me or take rough exception with something I say, the bottom line is I’m not going to take down his link to his weblog. I will, however, take it down right away if the links he provides become no longer useful, helpful, timely or interesting. So, it’s all about content.

That’s what weblogs are: content.

Now secondly, there are conferences for everything these days and usually the people who put on the conference and sometimes (hopefully) the folks who sponsor the conference (I’ve sponsored conferences before) are the ones making most the money. Without the smoke and mirrors, that is the primary reason to put on a conference. Speakers who go around the country speaking usually don’t do this pro bono, they do this to get paid. At the very minimum they usually ask for their fees to be reimbursed or covered (or free admittance). So the “bloggers” who pony up $500 for this BloggerCon, what are they going to get out of this? Will they generate five times this entry fee back in networking or will they just increase the number of people they have met in person on their link list (er, should I say “blogroll”)? Personally and professionally, I’m not sure, but I will say that I’m not typing in the airline ticketing URL anytime soon. I do have an open mind though and if I could see a business-related reason to attend this conference I wouldn’t hestitate to put down the 500 bones. It’s all relative.

But the part I don’t agree with in Mr. Orlowski’s article is what is all that different from blogs and someone who maintains a website and links to pages? I don’t understand the position of those who are upset by the Googlewashing because they are quite likely the same folks who spend most of their waking moment optimizing their pages and websites specifically for getting higher listing in the search engines. There is nothing wrong with writing and organizing content to make it easier for listing, but there comes a point where obsession takes over. If these same folks put that same energy into improving the content of their website, they’d be even more relevant and useful and have more people linking to them. This is the honesty factor in traffic circulating on the web: people who link up interesting or useful material versus those who play games trying to manipulate and cheat the algorithms.

I have always maintained that if you just keep your site and page relevant and not resort to trickery and deception, you’ll do just fine in the engines. If you have a diary or a journal or like to report on things, a weblog is nothing more than a script with an organizational scheme for you to do so. It’s like calling taking a bath, well, taking a bath.

If Google does filter out blogs and make them a separate search, I think that will be a good thing for their users (like me), actually. Although I can already search filtered blogs by using places like popdex. It’s easy to predict how this is going to shake out though: there are going to be websites that don’t consider themselves blogs being caught in the combines and vice versa. The people who are unhappy with their position in a free search engine are still going to need more cheese to go with their whine when and if Google makes this proposed change.

All this to essentially say a tomato is still a tomato and that one should attend conferences that he/she thinks will get return investment back in business. If Bloggercon is one of those, then by all means one should go. If it’s for a social gathering, however, then travel and expenses might be better spent somewhere tropical. To each his own.

Happy coding to you!

Did this post make you go hmm?

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