Bonehead Dan has learned a lesson: Readers rule.
Plainfield Today's companion blog, CLIPS, is what is known as an aggregator blog.
Unlike regular blogs, aggregator blogs are simply collections of links to other items on the Web. CLIPS links, as its tagline says, to "online stories of interest to the Tri-County area". That includes the local regularly publishing blogs as well as items from print (or 'legacy') media.
Aggregator blogs are held in disdain by some and are ignored by Google -- as I found out in the beginning when I tried to submit CLIPS to Google's 'crawler', its process of combing the hundreds of millions of pages on the Web to build the database that brings you those marvelous, near-instantaneous results.
Google's reasoning goes like this. If Google were to index aggregator blogs and aggregators were to simply put up blogs with nothing but links to their own posts, the Web would become a hall of mirrors, facilitated by Google, in which those wishing to game the system would rise in the search results by the use of these aggregator blogs. Makes sense to me.
On the other hand, there are those who think that aggregators are the online equivalent of a babushka, the Russian grandmother figure. You know, someone to remind you to wear your overshoes, eat your vegetables -- and read your news. And grownups don't need babushkas.
The question of CLIPS and linking to the local blogs was raised by a local blogger to me in a private email about a month ago. In my response, I offered to stop putting links up to that blog if the blogger desired. The favor of a reply was not granted.
A few days ago there was a post that singled out aggregator blogs and suggested readers had the choice of bypassing them by bookmarking sites they want to read, concluding "[t]here is no need for a nanny to tell you what to read."
In a fit of scruples, I assumed the blogger no longer wished to be linked to by CLIPS and accordingly took the link down yesterday. (As any good politician will tell you, you should always beware attacks of scruples.)
That was when blockhead Dan got his lesson.
Seems that readers get different mileage. They actually LIKE the aggregated blog CLIPS just because it does what it says it does -- put all the links to local news and views at the reader's fingertips. And readers told me so, in no uncertain terms.
Usefulness!
What a concept!
Chastened, I am returning the other blogger's links to CLIPS as of this morning.
Whether or not it is nannyish.
Babushkas of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your usefulness.
-- Dan Damon
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