Internet is polluted... again...

I still remember back in the days when Internet was still young. It was so difficult to find info about anything. Whatever link I hit, I ended up facing a "Under Construction" link. Getting e-mails back them was like: "wow, somebody remembered me, how nice".

Today, everything has changed: Too many pages with poor info and heavy flashy crap, too many e-mails not only from companies selling miraculous things to enlarge my stuff or make me loose weight, but friends believe that forwarding every e-mail with a funny story of a dog in a .pps is cool.

But what is annoying me the most today, are indeed the blogs. I was just searching the web for some Ubuntu backports for Breezy and I hit a blog with a guy talking about Chuck Norris. The whole thing is a mess (not that the Internet has ever been organized either)

I think somehow soon we will need an advanced search option on google to bypass useless blogs, if that's not possible already. Does blogs annoy anyone else? Or even worse... do you have a blog? If so, why?. Is it stuff worth reading or is it just like a diary? Because I believe peoples browsing the web could care less that your dog or cat is sick, what you've ate at school and what you did last summer...

Ah... I think I should just create a blog to post this

It's a bit harsh really. How many times do you see Geocities or Yahoo pages when you search? It's no different - people have blogs because they either have something to say or they use it to keep disparate people (family in other countries, friends abroad) up to date with personal happenings. It's that or send out a bulk email everytime.

I'd rather see a blog than some people's homepages - full of flash and flashing .gifs and the like. Hurts me far less.

Yeah, I've actually stumbled across a lot of useful information on blogs. When people do something cool with whatever language they use they like to post on their blog about it, I've found a few solutions that way

Let this be a lesson to all the would-be webmasters out there:

Whatever you do, whether it be a blog or a homepage or whatever, PLEASE do it in style and with good taste.

Like LQ.

I have a blog and I write about:

1. Linux related issues and articles on Linux (sometimes technical-related sometimes not).
2. General "techie" articles.
3. A community newsletter for my community.
4. Cricket (the game) related articles
5. Miscellaneous articles or thoughts.

Actually I think of a blog as more of a CMS system than anything else. It's just a dynamic website to organize content in chronological order. How one uses it is up to the individual. So I don't generalize and say that blogging is good or bad. Like anything else in life there are good blogs and there are bad blogs.

Unfortunately the problem is that the "barrier to entry" to blogging is so small that anybody can create a blog for free. Absolutely anybody... This is a good thing but it also has its downside.

I will say one thing. There does seem to be more than a fair share of crap in blogspot and other free blog hosting services simply because there are too many spammers, kids and ignorant people who create blogs just because it's the "in-thing" and not because they want to say something in the world. In the case of spammers, it may even be a case of automated bots created blogger accounts. But amidst all that there are also excellent, well-written "blogger" blogs out there.

Ultimately you cannot blame search engines or blogs. After all "blog" is nothing but a web page in the final analysis. So like all web pages they do get indexed by search engines. And you cannot prevent people from cross-exchanging links so many blogs do tend to get higher SE rankings. Also frequently updated content is another way to get noticed by search engines. I don't know the solution to this one, though... I agree that there should be a search mechanism to bypass blogs if you wish to. The question is how?

Thanks for the replies. Sorry if I sounded a bit angry in my post (I was actually, after failing on a lot of my searches on the net hitting blogs bashing Britney Spears when searching after Linux answers...).

I don't think blogs are evil, but they are mostly used in a wrong manner. Hari's blog for example is quite informative. Not only because it's about Linux, but because it's about serious stuff. It's put in a more "journalistic" way, than user Joe and noob Bob does.

I also see how important a system like blogs can be (as XavierP said), when you have family and friends living far from you. However, there're sites made only for that, as orkut (not sure about what this really is, I just hear about orkut a lot and it's also links for it in my gmail accounts).

But the problem starts when you do serious searches about a given problem and you hit somebody blogs that has nothing to do with Linux (or whatever you are searching) where the user has a link to a Linux site or has failed installing Linux and is bashing it. His blog has nothing to do with computers either, it's about apples and dogs, but he tried Linux once (Redhat 9.0, of course, in an AMD 64 with ATI card and sATA connectors. Oh, and he/she calls it Linux 9.0 as well ), failed and felt the urge to post it.

If I actually would compare the amount of time my searches took two years ago to find an accurate answer and the amount of time that my searches take today, I would be scared... I was not even bookmarking pages anymore because with google it was sometimes faster to find a site than on my badly organized bookmarks. I think I will have to start bookmarking the good sites again

If you are searching specifically about Linux I should have thought www.google.com/linux should filter it out better.

Anyway I can see your point. But then in a public environment like the WWW, you'll always have a lot of trash. I agree it's a problem. Maybe like technorati dedicated to *only* blog searches, there should be search engines dedicated to sites other than blogs.

However, if I don't find relevant results in Google even after several refinements of search, I usually try Yahoo or MSN. But only when google absolutely fails me

PS. Yes, bookmarking is a good habit to get into. There was a time when I absolutely had no bookmarks in my browser. But over time I have recognized its good uses and I have built up a nice collection of bookmarks categorized neatly. It's a chore, but I got used to doing it.

I use a blog as a news page for my podcast... it helps save time for reloading page repeatedly into the server when I can just logon and blog it down.

No No No, you've missed the point. The whole reason is to clog our intellectual arteries with useless junk. I know I can't get through a day without a visit to:

http://www.homestarrunner.com

The Strong Bad emails are a particularly great waste of time. I love it.

Originally posted by Dragineez No No No, you've missed the point. The whole reason is to clog are intellectual arteries with useless junk. I know I can't get through a day without a visit to: http://www.homestarrunner.com The Strong Bad emails are a particularly great waste of time. I love it.

Got to love the techno email.

Yeh i agree, especial the kunkemail crap. my gmail is holding out against that though. When i search google i am not normaly plagues be crap blogs or geocities like yourself, my searches are normal quite specific, i dont search there much anyway. But i do feel the ongrowing crap email are crap. and on windoz some popups piss me off and i dont need to loose weight or increase anything and on ebay i am not interested in paying 10quid to find out how to get a cheap ipod.

What about the sorry sods who actually are googling for companies selling miraculous things to enlarge their stuff or make them loose weight. Now they're gonna find this thread with those search terms and will probably think "Good god! What an utterly useless site. Why would people care about this lunix stuff in the first place".
Although if they have email, they needn't google

shoot me! I have a blog...

Yeah, there are a lot of useless blogs out there, but I personally have switched to blogging because it is so much easier to have updated content. I used to spend days, weeks getting a decent website up, then I would find that I didn't care... etc etc, and it wouldn't get uploaded (I have a few very very very immature websites out there)

Besides, blogging puts web publishing in the hands of the people- not that that can be a good thing sometimes. (re junk etc)

So, I think that blogging done right will revolutionise the web. Updated content, consistently.

titanium_geek

At least look at it this way: the alternative to this 'disorder and chaos' is government regulation.

A keyword search, like the "usual" one performed by Google, is very often not the most efficient one.

Google offers other types of searches in which the records have been categorized into some hierarchy of information by content. The records have not been thrown together willy-nilly by a computer based upon the occurrence of words "somewhere" in their text. There is, I believe, the conscious and deliberate action of a human editor.

There are others, such as the often-overlooked DMOZ (The Open Directory Project), which is the actual source of information for Yahoo.

And let's not overlook Wikipedia, which is an on-line encyclopedia in several languages that allows open contribution of content. Many sites, including this one, run their own special-purpose "wikis."

As for e-mail, I've told folks to .. call me. E-mail has been rendered useless by spam; the signal-to-noise ratio is simply too high, and you cannot guarantee that a message will be delivered, or once delivered, that it will be read.