Rise of blog culture - Top 3 concerns

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A few days back my wife was searching for something on the web and most of the top results were from the blogosphere. She was frustrated and told me that with the rise of blog culture was making her life on the web tougher. Triggered by that comment we started discussing if that was true and yes like always with the lot of positives that go with rise of blog culture there are quite a few 'negatives' too.

We could come up with the following 3 observations

Facts vs. Opinions
Most blogs in an effort to make 'content' original tend to give a spin to the event that they would have heard or read about. The spin could be in the form of a value addition, analysis or opinion or simply more data etc. Whatever be the spin, any event that occurs is covered by innumerable blogs and the search engines (including Google) rank them on the top of the heap which sometimes causes problems.

For example try searching for "Walmart Bharti JV" on Google and the posting I made covering the news (with my own assessment of course) comes as the first page. Is this good - definitely for my blog yes, but for somebody who simply wants to read the news item its bad news, because he has to strive that much harder before he reaches there.

Ranking News vs. Ranking Opinions
In today's era where user generated content is king I probably still want to be able to distinguish between top ranking news items and top ranking opinions. For example Digg offers me no such distinction where they separate the top of the heap data vs. top of the heap blog posts which makes my life tougher.

But looks like people are thinking in this direction already. In fact just today I came across this new site Blogg-Buzz which seems to be offering a Digg alternative specifically targeted towards blog posts.

The idea is that people looking for facts should go to a different place than people who are looking for highly ranked 'opinions'

Signal/Noise Ratio
Any event that occurs in the world in the blogosphere get multiplied many many times creating a lot of related content. Although some percentage of that might be very useful there would also be a lot of which that is not very useful and this only decreases the signal to noise ratio on the web which makes it tougher to catch signals amidst the noise. If one were to count the comments and discussion on blogs it would only further degrade the S/N ratio.

Tags: digg, blogosphere, blogg-buzz, page ranking