Last night I was interviewed by the great guys from WordCast about my research on WordPress, teaching social media and blogging classes and personal blogging experiences. We talked about the tight relationship between blog software and search engines that caused the implementation of the nofollow attribute on comment links in an attempt to combat spam. This deal shows one of the main differences between blog services and self-hosted blogs as the latter allow users to subvert the defaults by installing a dofollow plugin.
We also talked about my social media addiction that started in 1995 and about being offline. In contrast to the early days of the web it is very hard to be offline nowadays. We are nearing an era where being offline is a choice instead of being online. Fred Stutzman, a doctoral student on social media, actually developed the application Freedom for our era “in which our computers resist encroachments of connectivity.” I’m guess I’m not the only social media PhD student for whom being offline doesn’t come naturally.
Listen to the whole episode: WordCast Conversations 8: Anne Helmond on SEO and Social Media