The original purpose of a blog was to be a "Web log" of web sites other than one's own that one had visited during the day. The original bloggers were more math-heads than word-nerds, and their blogs often consisted of links alone.
Then when the search engines were working to attract people to the Internet, they became word-friendly. Blogs were supposed to contain original writing.
I have no problem with that. I enjoy reading blogs that consist of original writing more than I do blogs that are just lists of links. The links may be the source of all the information in the post, as they are in most Wikipedia posts (real experts in most fields write for paying publishers) and in most of the butterfly posts here. (Do you want a comprehensive study or a personal story? Good clear photos or original ones? Probably the former, right?) Even so, it's more fun to read posts where the blogger has at least verbalized what person took away from those other web sites.
Some blogs and zines still have a policy of requiring links to be hidden behind an original, logical sentence: where I usually drop a line, drop the link, drop another line and keep writing, as in "X's book: [space] book.amazon.com [space] says that rain is wet," they say things like "read this morning that rain is wet," with the different type indicating a hidden link. I usually don't want to make the time to do clever tricks like that.
But search engines have changed during this web site's lifetime. Lured by corporate advertising budgets, they've morphed from services to the reader into services to corporate advertisers. And they're anti-blog, these days. Occasionally someone does manage to find this web site on Google, but I'm not sure how.
Just for research purposes, I Googled an old post that continues to draw considerable traffic on this web site. I have mixed feelings about that post, too--the one about stingingworms. At the time of posting my post, which was paid well enough to justify the time I spent reading everything Google had to offer about the nasty things, really aggregated all the information that was available in cyberspace and in the good moth books. Pathetic. The post says that very little is known about them. Well, more is known about them now, though most of the links that have proliferated on Google merely repeat and add nothing to the existing knowledge. My post is no longer the most comprehensive study of the genus Hemileuca in cyberspace, even of studies in English alone (although the vermin are specifically American, a decent summary has been written in German). I didn't throw in all of the photos that were available at the time; more good photos are available now. Some of the links I used are broken now. My post is really out of date, but it's still drawing traffic because it's still the most comprehensive post that was written in English, more comprehensive in some ways than the one in German. So sometimes I think "I really ought to redo this post, as a series of long and short blog posts." And then I think, "Eww ick...harmless spiky butterfly caterpillars are an amusing gross-out, but do I really want to encourage people who got close enough to snap clear pictures of stingingworms and let them live?"
I grew up, as far as age fifteen, in a place where stingingworms had gone locally extinct. Then I lived in that place after their population resurged. When they were extinct was better. I don't believe the complete extinction of stingingworms would be worth poisoning lifeforms that deserve to live; I do believe stingingworms don't deserve to live. If you're close enough to photograph one, you're close enough to grind it into the ground.
But anyway, I typed the precise title of my post, including the unscientiic and thus distinctive common name "stingingworms," twice (with and without a space in "stinging worms"). Google hid this post. It showed some amateur posts that were totally unscientific and misleading, but it did not show mine. I think that's partly because Google tries to "personalize" search results and, having been rebuked for trying to flatter bloggers by always showing us our own posts on a topic ahead of everything else, they've gone to the other extreme and stopped showing us our own posts at all. I think, if the woman who posted the really horrible video had insisted that Google show her all matches for a search that included "stingingworms," she would have found my post.
And it would have improved her video if she had read my post, because her blurry photo didn't match the one clear photo of a slightly venomous caterpillar that might conceivably have harmed her child, and in the absence of a contact rash I have to wonder whether her child was really showing a chemical sensitivity that may be doing him more harm now. Her video was an amateurish mash-up of fair-use still shots, not of her child and not of relevant caterpillars, some of cartoons, and it gave a misleading impression that butterfly caterpillars are toxic. North America's butterfly caterpillars are toxic only if swallowed, though, in the absence of a contact rash, it's also possible that the child did swallow the caterpillar he'd been "playing with." (Or part of it. It's easy to squeeze plant material out of the digestive tract of a caterpillar; the shape may remind a child of toothpaste and the color of concentrated chlorophyll may suggest lime drops, so it's possible that some children would want to taste this digest--and many caterpillars eat toxic leaves.) The woman's intention clearly was to communicate her feelings of horror at the thought that her child had been made ill by "a caterpillar," but she shouldn't have published her video to the world without learning that there are different kinds of caterpillars and only a few of the hundreds can harm humans. Most of the undesirable ones harm our gardens and crop fields, but they don't directly harm us.
The cure for bad information, like that video that Google robotically rates near the top of its search page, is not censorship but good information. I could fill that gap...if someone were paying for the time it would take. I've read enough general studies and general science that it wouldn't take long for me to complete an online course and become a B.S. or even M.S. in entomology, if any entomologists out there want to sponsor me (I qualify for the reduced senior tuition fees). I wrote the posts that pushed monarch-butterfly.com above Wikipedia on Google when that site existed; the site wasn't very "commercial" but the articles were edited by someone with a degree in entomology. So (shameless self-promotion is what the Internet is for) I can write up research about moths and butterflies, and I can write SEO-friendly content for sites that need it, which we decided long ago this site doesn't. I could build a nonprofit site to the bottom of which advertisers would be begging to add small inoffensive ads. Just add money.
The purpose of my stingingworm posts was to help disambiguate Hemileuca from the Dreaded Gyps, or spongies. That, they still do. But they could be more informative today than they could be ten years ago. If anyone Out There wants to see that happen, just add money. Five dollars per post and, due to the ongoing question of which really are distinct species in a genus as variable as Hemileuca, some authorities list thirty species, so we're talking $150. The price per post is flat, although some of these species names pull up lots of material and some still pull up only museum pieces and articles in old books. Still, at least it is now possible to get a linked series of posts, in one place, with at least one clear picture of each species (or distinct variant). People do want to read all about the little loathlies. If you are or know an entomologist who wants to build a web site about them, we can do that too. In fact the butterfly posts started out to be a book, and they could still be a book, or an online "hub."
But the larger question today is how long the sold-out search engines are going to be of any use to anyone at all. Corporate funders are playing to web site builders' vanity by encouraging them to think of themselves as "gatekeepers."
The argument was spelled out very well in Jon Ward's Testimony, which you should ask your bookstore to e-mail you upon receipt of. Elitist bigotry, the belief that if God wanted you to have any influence on society God would have caused you to be born into a rich family, is the biggest and nastiest of the three main forms of bigotry in our world today; it always was worse than racism and sexism together because it underlies racism and sexism, because in practice most prejudice against women or against ethnic groups is based in the perception that they don't have enough money to be in the Rich Guys Club. Elitist bigots were really badly disturbed by Donald Trump, not because he's an easy person to dislike (he is) or had some very bad ideas about governing the country (he did) or was able to do much more damage with his bad ideas than any other President (he wasn't), and not even because he's a Republican (he's not one, at heart--he's all about Donald Trump), but because, while being one of those awful people the Rich Guys formed their Club, or clique, to keep out, he managed to earn enough money to get in. Elitist bigots really hate that it was possible for Donald Trump to exist and, while they babble incoherently about the harm Trump might have been able to do if the system hadn't been set up to prevent it (which it was, and it worked well), what's really fibrillating their brains is "We-MUST-make-it-impossible-for-any-more-working-class-immigrants'-sons-to-become-so-rich."
A deeply un-American sentiment. Bigotry is anti-Christian and un-American. Christianity says that the important thing is not money but salvation, and the cost of that is dedication to God. America says that the pursuit of wealth is the natural right of everyone. Elitist bigots are what our ancestors decided, long ago, should go back to Europe, and we need to stand by that principle today. Elitist bigots are the kind to which we should give no sanction. They have the right to get out quietly as long as their feet keep moving until they are out of here.
Elitism is not to be confused with wealth, conservatism, or "background." I have plenty of "background," myself, and I see nothing wrong with inherited land (if it's well used as a trust from God), or old money (ditto), or a conservative temperament. Having those things and enjoying them is all very well. Bigotry against people who don't happen to have them is trashy, and an indication that you don't deserve to enjoy them, yourself. In old Europe the royal families inbred their "royal blood" until they really did breed in a genuine fatal blood disease. Let us avoid that mistake. The gates should open easily when anyone takes the trouble to climb the hill. The important consideration about heirs is not what they look like, but what they propose to do with the inheritance.
But the "gatekeepers" of Google and Twitter and the irredeemable F******k just can't wait to set up a feudal hierarchy in the Internet, where only the top-paying customers get their words read. Fear of "caterpillars," uninformed by any clue which ones are friends or foes, sells Raid. Google will take the money to promote fear above facts, gladly, I saw in the wee hours of this morning. Twitter is not at all concerned about serving its original purpose of allowing individuals to communicate instantly about weather or other disasters, crimes in process of being committed, breaking news, natural phenomena, all the things where any random individual can "scoop" all the major news media and the news media need for that to happen, as long as the news media pay more to keep banging the drums about whatever Big Story they've chosen for endless repetition. YouTube and other sites...any time a site's contract goes into smeary, subjective language about not wanting to handle "offensive" or "misleading" content, we all need to know what that means in plain language.
What the Internet censors mean by "offensive" or "misleading" or even "racist" is not "content that advocates legalizing the slow painful murder of people selected for a specific gene," which would include, e.g., anything that promotes or fails to demand a total global ban on glyphosate, but which would also include any promotion of drinking alcohol. What they mean is "insufficiently supportive of our biggest paying clients."
We all need, as we enjoy this delightful tour through cyberspace, to keep our shoes on, our bags packed, and our faces toward the door. Google's not a real friend. Twitter's not a real friend. Amazon's not a real friend. Probably the smaller sites that are less widely useful now--DuckDuckGo, MeWe, Gettr, Proton, LiveJournal, et a.--and can afford to be friendlier, now, won't be real friends for long after the sites that are currently the most useful have imploded from their own greed.
Google is actively non-promoting my site, and probably your site. Twitter, with its current policy of "filtering" individuals' tweets out of each other's feeds in such a way as to make sure that we all see more corporate tweets than individual tweets, is doing very little to promote our work either. F******k has been useless for at least ten years, and was harmful before that I might add. I still get more traffic from those posts I've shared on Twitter than from those I've not shared on Twitter, but not much more.
From the very limited amount Twitter has shown me of e-friends' sites, the same thing is happening to them. If you're online to market a product, in the current state of the economy, God help you. (I can't. Don't ask. Even if you're a writer whose blog I look forward to reading every day and really miss on the days when I don't get to it, I still don't have any money.) If you're online to socialize with friends in between paid jobs, you're having more fun than most people in cyberspace are having...but you're not meeting new people, are you? Not building a network. Not increasing the number of paid jobs, or decreasing the time that's available for socializing and blog maintenance. You're still telling your family, sponsors, etc., that that's the purpose of your web surfing, and it's true in the sense that that's what you'd like to see happen and even in the sense that you're not looking at porn, but it's not doing for your numbers what it did ten years ago. Am I right, or am I right?
Well. What worked for us before the giants reached their present unhealthy, unsustainable size, when Twitter was a joke and Google was nice but no substitute for a library's book catalogue? Exactly. Back to that we go.
Google used to down-rate blogs with lots of links lower than it did blogs with lots of words. Google now down-rates all personal blogs far enough that I doubt that's going to make a difference. Actual readers liked the link logs. Actual readers came here daily to see whether they'd been linked, and what if anything had been said about their linked content; and they stayed to browse and learn and interact. I like comments. I like interaction from and among readers. Currently all the comments here, apart from the occasional spammer, are coming from people who know each other through one link-up site or another. That's nice, but the goal was to attract people from different sites, who did not already know each other, and be generally helpful to people
* of good will
* who like to read
* serious material,
* although funny and frivolous material is OK too, sometimes,
* and like animals
* and enjoy being outdoors
* and appreciate younger people
* (yes, younger people are welcome to comment too!)
* and generally enjoy being alive
* enough to want to stay safe and healthy
* in a friendly, sustainable, sanely governed (i.e. libertarian) world,
* and complete agreement is nice, but different perspectives are good. Good outweighs nice.
We don't want to promote anything by haters, especially elitists, (In a lifeboat that had room for either Donald Trump or an anti-Trump elitist, heavenforbidandfend, I'd take Trump.)
The Internet is global. This web site is American. We do not assume, as some bloggers do, that all readers in foreign countries must be spammers or hackers. Some of them certainly are, and then some of them are real readers. We hate no country. We take no sides, although we condemn the idea of war and the act of starting one, the manufacture of poisons and the act of constructing trade agreements that obligate people to buy them, and other abominations.
If you are the kind of person who belongs at this web site, you're encouraged to set up a Blogspot or Blogger site. (Blogspot and Blogger used to be two separate companies; both now belong to Google.) It may or may not suit your purposes to maintain an actual blog, but by maintaining a Blogspot hosted site, you get the benefit of Blogspot's "Reading List" feed, which provides the headline, the top picture, and the first 50 to 75 words from each blog you follow. This allows you to confirm that e-friends are still active on days when the headlines of our blog posts are all you want to read. All the headlines line up in one place, and you can click on only the ones you do want to read. Very convenient. Also, having a Blogger account should make it easy to comment on posts here after you've read them.
For a long time you could have found the links that will be reappearing, here, on Twitter...but Twitter's not been faithful to its contract. So those links are coming back here.
Each of us is once again responsible for communicating with one another--and we need to be building a system for doing that via real mail, convenient though it's been not to have to go to the post office and pay for stamps. The tools the various corporations offered us for doing all that kind of thing online are breaking down and not being repaired. We have to go back to maintaining our networks for ourselves.
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