Caffeinated Simpleton

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The Internet is Fluff

I’ve written three blog posts recently, all at various technical levels. The first was a post about a little JavaScript class library called Cobra that I had written. It detailed what problems the library solved and how to use it. The library was nothing special, just a few lines, but it was unique and got a thousand views or so. The next post was a very technical post on how and why Cobra was written the way it was. It assumed the reader had a fairly good knowledge of JavaScript and went into some deep issues on how the internals of inheritance and scoping work in JavaScript. It got very little attention. My last post was mostly fluff. It just talked about how I’ve hopped on the git bandwagon. Nothing controversial, nothing enlightening, nothing really worth reading. It has been, by far, the most popular of the three.

This bothers me. It does not bother me that my blog is not that popular; I keep it mostly for me. It does not bother me that posts that are deeply technical are not the most popular articles. I might not be a very good writer, and I might not be saying anything that interesting. What does bother me is that the most helpful posts I have written are probably going to be the least read. The only true value on this blog is posts that go into the internals of how something works. These are the posts that, hopefully, people will read and get something out of. I do a lot of work gathering the knowledge that I do have, and if I can pass it on efficiently, then I am accomplishing my goal. However, Google is the reality of how the internet works. If Google doesn’t see a lot of links coming into your page, then you won’t get any visitors. That’s fine, except that you also won’t get that one guy who really wants to understand the internals of JavaScript inheritance; that one guy who really just wants a library to allow some consistency in JavaScript class declarations without getting in the way.

Now I’m not saying I’m the one guy who can answer these questions. JavaScript inheritance is fairly well covered by the likes of JavaScript gurus Douglas Crockford and John Resig. However, the concept extends well beyond this specific topic. When a person develops a deeply technical knowledge on a new topic, his knowledge will be lost to the internet until enough people have developed the same knowledge to recognize the first guy’s contributions. Once there is a big enough base, all these people can cross reference each other and gain critical mass on google. Then, finally, the topic can hit the mainstream. The problem is, the necessary knowledge for a less technical person to get into a topic was there months, or even years ago. It was just impossible to find.

Solving this problem is really, really hard. Ideally, a search engine could capture the meaning of an article and register that it is something original, something that explains something generally not known. It would then have to infer that a person searching wants something more technical than what he has found so far. I would go as far as to say that today, that’s impossible. Instead, the “semantic web” is probably the evolution that has to happen to make this work. With quality tagging, I should be able to indicate that an article is about JavaScript, inheritance, and that it is not for beginners. I should be able to indicate that links to other articles about JavaScript inheritance are not just random links to things I’m discussing, but are references to articles that deal with the exact same issue. I should be able to indicate which references explain things at a higher level and which give a more general overview. I should be able to qualify how the rest of the body of knowledge relates to my small contribution.

This, in my mind, is the promise of the semantic web. The problem is, of course, that it requires a lot more work. As an author, I have to describe how my contribution fits into the rest of the web. As a search engine, results are less a linear ranking, and more a web of how topics interrelate. Designing an interface that pulls in all the relevant information and is still easy to use will be difficult.

Someday somebody will figure out how to achieve similar results without the up front effort. Otherwise, my dreams will probably never be achieved. Until then, however, I’ll continue to watch as baseless opinions win the day and potentially new knowledge is lost in the sludge somewhere near the end of Google’s long tail.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 8:10 pm and is filed under What I'm thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • I think sites like Reddit are a step away from how you're describing things. Since it's about other people passing along links, it doesn't matter if you're the first or not, just that you had a good enough post for people to want to pass along. I know I found your git post on Reddit and since I'm interested in git, I read it. I wasn't searching for anything but I still found that post. I could have been looking for Javascript stuff and found one of your other links on Reddit.

    As it is, I'm glad I found your git post since I didn't know about git-svn and now I'm able to use git at work.
  • Glad I could help :)
  • ein2015
    Could it be possible that simply more people care about version control systems than javascript?

    I happened to be reading up on people's opinions about git and why they choose git, which is how I stumbled upon your blog.

    However, I agree with your desire for the semantic web. At the very least it would do a better job of connecting people with what they want to know.
  • Hmm, I must have not done a very good job of writing this post, as everybody
    seems to be misunderstanding it.

    Of course people care more about some things than others, but the point is
    that the more valuable contribution is the one that is harder to find (in my
    opinion). It's regrettable.
  • Jason
    I generally agree with the sentiment of this post, but I think the key concept of what is 'more valuable' is more subtle and subjective than what you are giving it credit for.
    Agreed, the critical mass phenomena produces a pyramid type of effect in the dissemination and accessibility of information, but sometimes that seems to form part of a bigger picture in how things are developed and shared in society.
    The nature of the internet really highlights and accentuates these processes, and I think sometimes distorts expectations of how humans can and do consume information.
  • Well, part of the popularity of your git post is that it's about distributed version control systems. I did a post comparing Mercurial to Bazaar many months ago and it is still the top entry on my blog. It's enough of a hot button topic that once you get some exposure and higher in the Google rankings the traffic just inherently spikes.
  • I agree, but that's not the issue. Articles about more popular topics are
    always going to be more popular. If I wrote about celebrity gossip, I might
    be able to get 5x the traffic. The point is that the more useful information
    is lost because of the inherent weakness of search engines: they are based
    on popularity. Popularity has proven to be a good metric, but not the only
    metric. How we begin to take more metrics into account will be very
    interesting, I think.
  • You're touching on a phenomenon that I find quite distressing: the movement of (all?) mass media to the lowest common denominator.
    One of the interest-delimited solutions is specialized systems like hacker news (ycombinator) - which is where I first found link to your post.
    In the web as a whole there a trumping of quality by quantity. Therefore wide-open sites (reddit comes to mind) lose their interest for specialists.
    Yet there *is* a value to page-visits by "quality" (i.e., non-general-public) web surfers.
    With time systems will be developed to tap that market. (hope, hope). Thanks for the post.
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