Laurabelle’s Blog

In class discussion on Wednesday, when the Digital Reference Assignment was due, Michael Harkovitch mentioned one of the questions he had answered for the IPL, about the meaning of the word pimping, used by a certain person in a certain context. For him this question raised issues of authority, due both to the lack of official sources about slang and to the fact that the ultimate authority is the people who use it. As he explains in an article for this month's Silverfish (the iSchool student newspaper), he ended up with a multitude of variant definitions from as many sources, many of which were personal websites. (Michael's article is currently accessible here but may eventually be archived here.)

Either Michael or Joe or someone else mentioned weblogs in the context of authority, and Joe said that he was fairly sceptical of weblogs in and of themselves, although he thought they were a good route to somewhere else via links and such. I spoke up as a weblogger and said that weblogs were not meant to be authoritative, except where authority is merited—for example, my weblog is authoritative on the subject of what's going on in my life at the moment, but I have absolutely no authority on the subject of cyber begging (which is the top search query for number of hits to this site; I am #4 on Google in a search for that phrase). Of course, any discussion of what a weblog is or isn't good for also needs to settle on some definition of a weblog on which to base any further conclusions, and I haven't seen a satisfactory definition yet.

Whatever they are, in general, blogs aren't written to be authoritative. They're for fun, for conversation with friends, for sharing photos, for showing off, for whatever. As Aquarion rightly complains, Ninety percent of weblogs are crap, depending on how you define weblog. Personal weblogs aren't significantly different from personal webpages in terms of the information they carry and the authority of that information. Furthermore, weblogs that come from a reputable source (what about the many librarians who maintain weblogs about LIS?) are authoritative, regardless of their means of production and publication. The fact that most weblogs are crap is no different from any other information distribution. Most novels are crap. Most reference works are crap. The job of information science is to find the good stuff.

I've heard that Google, with its dominance on web-information, has bought Blogspot and either has already or is going to separate blogs from normal results in its web searches. I could be wrong about that, but it's what the blogging community is talking about these days, and I can't be bothered to find an authoritative source at the moment. If it's true, I'm not sure how I feel about that. First of all, how can Google determine what's a blog and what's not? Secondly, what's wrong with returning results from blogs? Dorothea has her series on Movable Type. Simon Willison has his CSS tutorial series. Mark Pilgrim posts good stuff about everything web and lots more besides. Blogs are just as good as returning my silly report about CD formats every time someone searches on the invention of CDs. Phil Ringnalda argues (and Paul Freeman's experience supports him) that the reason blogs come up top in searches is that they're truly the best Google can find for that search query. There just isn't anything else, or maybe another phrase would work better.

People should just make it easy on themselves and ask a librarian.