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.
I will be speaking (in English) at the first WordCampNL edition in Utrecht on 31 October 2009. I will be presenting my research on Blogging for Engines filled with updates and practical implications for bloggers. Please join us if you’re interested in blogging/WordPress and I hope to see you there!
Summary:
Blogging is often seen as a new form of journalism, an online diary or a democratising medium which potentially gives every citizen a voice. However, what can we say about blogging and the blogosphere if we look at blogs from within the medium? In other words, what is blogging when we look at the software blogs are made with?
Anne Helmond graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a study on WordPress, the leading blog software. This research focuses on how blog software and search engines arose at the same time (1999) and have since established a tight relationship. What does this mean for bloggers, blogs and the blogosphere if we look beyond search engine optimization?
In February I graduated cum laude with a thesis on blog software and search engines titled ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations.’ It aims to add the study of software-engine relations to the emerging field of Software Studies, which may open up a new avenue in the field by accounting for the increasing entanglement of the engines with software thus further shaping the field.
This thesis wishes to contribute to the understanding of blogs by approaching blogs as both a medium and bi-product of practice that are both entangled in software-engine relations. In the history of blogging both the medium and practice are constantly being shaped by the search and indexing engines. Not only did the introduction of the ‘nofollow’ attribute have a major impact on the construction of the blogosphere, it also points to how the blogger is (un)willingly entangled in a relationship that the blog software establishes with the engines. The common blog practices of tagging, social bookmarking and the obsessive checking of blog statistics raise the question if we are now blogging to feed the engines. Continue to read an excerpt of my PhD proposal to continue my research on software-engine relations, or download the PDF ‘Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations.’ (4,2 Mb)
Excerpt PhD Proposal on Software-Engine Relations
Google as the number one search engine is regarded by many to be “the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) and “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007). What is missing from the current studies into software is the recognition of the central role that the engines play on the web. The engines are considered to be the starting point of the web and play an important editorial role on the web. Introna and Nissenbaum (2000) describe the politics of search engines with the engines
[...] determining any systematic inclusions and exclusions, the wide-ranging factors that dictate systematic prominence for some sites, dictating systematic invisibility for others. These, we think, are political. They are important because what people (the seekers) are able to find on the Web determines what the Web consists of for them. And we all —individuals and institutions alike— have a great deal at stake in what the Web consists of.
The politics of inclusion and exclusion in the search engines, which may also be described as the drama of search engines (Govcom.org, 2007), is clearly visible in the case of the website 911truth.org which suddenly disappeared from Google results. These issues raise the question if and how the web is structured by search engines. Rogers (2008) describes how the engines are demarcating different spheres on the Web. Previous research done with the Digital Methods Initiative (2007) not only showed how the engines construct different spheres but also how these spheres are constructed differently by different engines. What role does the software play in the construction of these different spheres?
Previous research into the role of software and the engines in the blogosphere showed that there is an increasing symbiotic relationship between the two (Helmond, 2008). In this study into the most prevailing blog software, WordPress, it appeared that is is establishing strong ties with Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati. The blog software and blog engines determine the nature and construction of the blogosphere through co-construction. These software-engine relations enforce a steady regime in the blogosphere that puts the blogger in a position where the politics of inclusion and exclusion are played out in the game of search engine optimization and spam.
Thank you very much for inviting me. My name is Anne Helmond and I am currently a New Media Lecturer at the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam. I also work at the Institute of Network Cultures, an Amsterdam based media research center. I am focusing my current research on software-engine relations, analyzing the entanglement of the engines into software.
I would like to propose to redefine the current perception we have of the blogger because people might think of the blogger as a pajama clad revolutionary or the lonely writer who sits in the dark in his room. However, the blogger is an active researcher. One would have to admit that the main amount of this activity is engine based. A lot of research is done via engines, it is engine work.
Then one starts to think about engines and bloggers and how are the software-engine relations are build into the medium and practice of blogging. Then one would have to think about the engines:
What is missing from the current studies into software is the recognition of the central role that the engines play in blogging. How one actively blogs with the engines in mind.
And also increasingly how engines are playing a role in how the blog software is continually being optimized for the engines.
The engines have a particular idea of what the blogosphere is, namely that the blogosphere of the indexable which is posts.
Let’s examine these three points in reverse chronological order.
The blog software feeds the engines for the engines’ indexing and thereby creating what you might call a symbiotic relationship. In some specificity: The engines index the blogosphere through site feeds and ping. The WordPress default site feeds only syndicates the five most recent posts which reinforces the distinct unit of the post as the native format of the blog. Comments are offered in a separate feed and pages are not syndicated at all. What is the blogosphere? According to the engines, that what is indexible namely the five latest posts. The engines see the blogosphere as posts only. The blogroll, pages and comments are not part of the blogosphere as seen by engines. This means that the comments actually form a different part of the blogosphere, the commentosphere.
Blog standards have also enabled the engines to construct a blogosphere in which the bloggers are subject to a software-engine regime. The daily blogging practice brings users directly into the disarray of software-engine politics as illustrated in the case of spam and nofollow. The nofollow attribute as an example of the political implications of the software-engine relations on the blogosphere. Spam is one of the practices that exploit the software-engine relations within the blogosphere.
What is nofollow?
Nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place. (Wikipedia)
Nofollow is a default setting in all the major blog software and it is important because it is a visible intervention, unlike other indexing decisions, by the software makers and the search engines and not the blogger. It has an impact on the meaning and value of links and it influences ranking and indexing which is different per search engine.
Blog software is optimized for the engines. This symbiotic relationship between the software and the engines is not without consequences. The engines are increasingly entangled in both the medium and practice of blogs which has implications on several levels. The influence of the engines on the medium and practice of blogs asks for a critical examination of this relationship.
A WordPress blog notifies ping servers by default which means that a WordPress blog is almost automatically included in the engines. The relationship between the software and the engines is two-fold: the software embraces the engines and the engines embrace the protocols within the software. WordPress implicitly acknowledges this relationship by implementing features that connect to the engines but it also explicitly states that “WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines.” The default settings in WordPress, such as providing feeds and pinging the engines, feed your blog to the engines.
Google is seen as the entry point to the web. Google as the number one search engine is regarded by many to be “the start page for the Internet” (Dodge, 2007) and “Google has become such a commonly used resource that people are beginning to regard it as synonymous with the Web.” (Searls in Gudrais, 2007). The main entry into the blogosphere is also provided by the engines which is why we need to critically examine their role. On top of that the different engines seem to create different blogospheres.
In a previous case study done with the Digital Methods Initiative of the University of Amsterdam we asked “To what extent do search engines not only map the blogosphere but also construct it?” Google, Google Blog Search and Technorati all construct different parts of the blogosphere with a small overlap.The engines seem to segregate the web by demarcating different web spheres, for example the blogosphere, the newssphere and the tag-o-sphere and different blogospheres.
By using the RSS protocol for indexing the engines duplicate the distinction between blog posts and other blog content and segregate the web by just indexing posts. According to Google blog search the blogosphere consists of blog posts. The question is whether software-engine relations contribute to the
construction of different web spheres?
The blog is not a closed environment but a dynamic entity due to its dispersive nature. This graphic by Wired Magazine illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the blogger, blog software and the engines.
So my research concerns the radical idea that bloggers do not so much blog for a public, but for engines, with the aid of blog software.
Last week I gave a talk on ‘The Widgetized Self. Distributed identity and the role of software-engine relations in blogging.’ Blogs may be seen as databases that allow for various types of identity construction. The use of themes, plugins and widgets play an important role in the blogging identity.
Edial Dekker, New Media student at the University of Amsterdam, wrote about my lecture for the Dutch communication blog Spotlighteffect. His blogpost (in Dutch) has the provoking title: “The role of widgets. Nerds are more personal” which refers to the fact that expressing your identity through technology such as blog software still requires knowledge of the code. If you want to change the defaults you need to be able to install plugins or manually adjust php or CSS. In blogging we can distinguish several types of identity formation that coexist together and contribute to each other:
the default identity (with default themes and templates)
the drag and drop identity (choosing your plugins and widgets)
the distributed identity (using the blog as a centralized force to collect your distributed self)
the database identity (those who actually use their blog as a database of the self)
The blog is a database that supplies different ways for identity construction. On top of that other databases are used to further mold and shape the identity of the blogger. The modding user is constantly tweaking and adjusting the blog, either at the front side or the back side, in order to construct a self online.
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