Bridging the Archipelago
2012/02/07 11:25
No Blog is an Island
I spent a short time greping the blog's server log to find inbound links. That is - other sites which link to this blog. I was disappointed to see that while there are a few links from Facebook, the links aren't traceable back to the originating facebook post because facebook cloaks the referer url. So instead of the referer url looking something like this...
https://www.facebook.com/conoroneill/posts/102130236577473
... it looks like this...
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://walterhiggins.net/blog/15-Identical-Pairs-Of-Grey-Socks.html
This makes it difficult for bloggers to see where Facebook traffic is coming from. What makes things worse for bloggers are URL shorteners. I get a lot of t.co referers but these are effectively useless in that they resolve to the destination URL not the refering/source URL. Slowly but surely, the plumbing of the internet is being dismantled and I'm not sure I like what's replacing it. 99.9% of the internet population don't care about such things (nor should they) but as an independent blogger I feel less connected because of these subtle changes.
In the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the user experience is just...better.
-- What Commons Do We Wish For? | John Battelle's Search Blog
I know intuitively that there has to be a better way - a way to converse and comment without resorting to walled-garden solutions like Twitter, Facebook, Disqus etc. I just don't know what that looks like yet. I think in Dave Winer's recent writing, he's reaching towards something. There is the germ of an idea which could make Facebook and Twitter as irrelevant in the 2010s as AOL became in the 2000s. Whatever it is - it will be up to us bloggers - we Island Folk - to build it. We need to make it easier to establish a homestead and once established, communicate with each other. One thing is for sure, it needs to be easier and more intuitive than Trackbacks. We need to be able to demonstrate to the inhabitants of Facebook and Twitter that island life isn't so bad. That our plumbing and telephones are as good as anything on the Facebook and Twitter mainlands. We're not quite there yet.
This is part 1 of a 3 part series on blogging & social networks. Part Two: Postcards From The Islands. Part Three: Own Your Own Mothership