Kindred Spirits
7 October 2004
Through my random internet wanderings, I happened today upon Scott Timmreck’s weblog and happily found my own site linked therein. This lead me to realize how part of the potential of RyanCannon.com has been wasted since its genesis—a problem I soon hope to alleviate.
The internet, as I have said before, is the great leveller: earn enough credibility for your site, gain enough readership, and anyone for a mere $50/year could be a Bill O’Riley (God help us) or Michael Moore. The major problem on the Internet exists everywhere (although it is slighlty more transparent online): who do we trust?
There is no true answer to this question. For scholars, credibility comes through cogent discourse based in reliable information, yet still it is amazing how poor some articles can be and still get published. In television, the medium itself grants some credibility; if someone who knew did not believe a speaker worthy, he or she simply wouldn’t appear on TV, right? Same with the radio—although financial motivations sometimes wreak havoc with this standard. The Internet is a different world, as the World Wide Web provides anyone with a computer and connection to serve their own dose of retality by the bucket.
Online, advertising does not pull well and “window shopping” does not exist as it does in other media. While you can walk through a llibrary and see all of the books on a single subject—good or bad—search engines attempt to sort for the most relevant pages, using different criteria to rank them, hiding some pages at the end of the list. So how do humble bloggers get their little nugget of wisdom out to the world? By banding together.
Most search engines rank a site according to the number of pages they have already registered that link to that page. The more links, the higher the rank. How many web sites contain a “get Acrobat Reader” link within their text, which launches Adobe’s web site far above Ringling Bros. or Cirque du Soleil. In order to improve the standing of bloggers like me (read: those I trust), I have added a “Kindred Spirits” section to the Important Reads section, which will list those sites I trust and enjoy: those writers I call friend.
