Google Bombs Jon Swift

As I have said before, I do not approve of any bombs that are not being dropped on our enemies or those civilians who are unlucky enough to get in the way. So when I informed my readers as a public service of a "Googlebomb" that was designed to guide searchers looking for information on Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism to this piece of mine, I was not endorsing it in any way, as I pointed out at the time. A "Google Bomb" according to Wikipedia, is an "attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions" by associating a word or phrase with a particular web page. For example, one famous Googlebomb linked the words "miserable failure" to the White House homepage. I believe that any attempt to manipulate Google's search results, which are a sacred institution, should be against the law if it is not already. What if terrorists got their hands on a cache of Googlebombs? None of us would be safe.

And yet it appears that Google has decided to punish this modest blogger despite the fact that I am actually a victim of this nefarious attempt to hijack Google. Google has now erased all traces of my piece "Jonah Goldberg's Shining (Liberal Fascism with LOLCats)" from search results for the phrase "Liberal Fascism." While it was once in the Top 10 of results for a search on the words "Liberal Fascism" it is now missing from that search entirely. Despite the fact that my piece has 94 links, according to Technorati, Google has decided that after the Amazon page for the book, the most informative links for the words "Liberal Fascism" include a Think Progress piece from two years ago that is not really about the book, with 9 links; a piece from The Corner (0 links) about all the great reviews the book has received; a piece by Cactus from the Angry Bear (1 link), who, like me, has not actually read the book; another piece from two years ago by Brendan Nyhan (4 links) ridiculing the book; and a page from the Urban Dictionary (27 links) defining a word that I cannot repeat here since this is a family-safe blog. (Update: The Urban Dictionary page has now moved into the Number One slot ahead of the Amazon page.)

It turns out that this page in the Urban Dictionary was actually the subject of another Googlebomb by quite a large number of liberal blogs. Despite the fact that until recently the words "Liberal Fascism" did not appear on this page and Google's claim that Googlebombs no longer work, it has risen high in the search results. So why was my page removed and not the Urban Dictionary page? I believe it may have something to do with this post: "What If a Googlebomb Is a Googledud?" which referred to the attempt to Googlebomb "Liberal Fascism" by linking to my piece but did not mention the Urban Dictionary Googlebomb. Both Jonah Goldberg and Instapundit linked to that post, which no doubt resulted in a number of complaints sent to Google. The only explanation I can come up with is that Google responded to complaints by manually editing the results, something they claim they try never to do.

And yet the Googlebomb linking to my page is not really a Googlebomb at all. My piece is highly relevant and informative. It is certainly more relevant than the Urban Dictionary page. It actually praises Jonah Goldberg's ideas and even offers to help him with his project. By removing my page from the search results, Google is suppressing my point of view, engaging in the kind of censorship that ironically might be termed "fascist." The fact that Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, two people who are outspoken in their support of free expression, apparently aided in this attempt to muzzle my free expression, pains me to no end. What, one wonders, are they afraid of?

I hope that Google will restore my page to its search results. I worked very hard on researching this piece and creating the illustrations for it, as did a number of readers who offered their own contributions. Judging by the number of links it has gotten, many bloggers have found it to be highly edifying. If Google is going to manually edit results to ban sites whenever it receives complaints, where will it end? Will it ban sites that negatively review books whenever an author complains? Will it ban sites that criticize corporations when their CEOs complain? Will it ban sites that criticize governments when their leaders complain? Today, Jon Swift was banned. Tomorrow, it may be you.

Update: Jonah Goldberg himself offers some support for this modest blogger. Thank you, Mr. Goldberg.

Update 2: The inscrutable Google gods have returned the page to the search results where it now sits at #11. From Google there is only silence.

Illustration created by SlipperyBrick.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, Google, Books, Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, LOLcats, Internet, Politics

Blogrolling

This past weekend Atrios, the proprietor of Eschaton, declared a Blogroll Amnesty Day, saying, "one of the big complaints by new bloggers is that it's impossible to get onto blogrolls because established bloggers tend not to add them." I thought that adding new lesser-known blogs to his blogroll would be a wonderful idea. Although for some inexplicable reason that I am at pains to discover, Atrios has never seen fit to link to me, I, nevertheless added Eschaton to my own blogroll and introduced myself to Atrios with a sincerely sycophantic email, since he is after all a blogging pioneer who deserves our respect.

But the more I learned about this Amnesty Day, the more I realized that it was a very strange amnesty indeed. The amnesty he granted turned out to be amnesty for himself. He wanted to assuage himself of the guilt he might feel at kicking blogs off his blogroll instead of granting amnesty to others to swarm across the border into his domain. "Everyone feels a wee bit guilty about removing blogs from their blogroll, so they're hesitant to add new ones to an ever-expanding list," he explained. So Atrios deleted his entire blogroll and disappointingly repopulated it for the most part with the usual suspects. Then others in the liberal blogosphere followed his example, including Jesus' General and PZ Myers at Pharyngula, who already takes a very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest approach to blogrolling (see updates below). Then Markos at Daily Kos joined this ruthless bloodletting. "It sucks and it feels bad," he said, daubing the tears from his eyes as he typed. So the end result of Atrios' Amnesty Day was to make some blogrolls smaller and even more exclusive than they already were.

Although as a conservative I am opposed to amnesty when it comes to Vietnam War draft dodgers, illegal immigrants and old people, when it comes to blogrolling I am surprisingly liberal, as you can see from the Blogroll Policy I have posted on my sidebar. "I will add anyone to my blogroll who adds me to theirs, whether conservative, liberal, moderate, libertarian or Albigensian, with the exception of spam or porn blogs or anything else your mother would be embarrassed to read," it states. I oppose litmus tests for blogs as well as Supreme Court Justices.

You might think that for all their talk of being inclusive, more liberals might agree with my policy. Although some other blogs have adopted my policy as their own, and my blogroll was recently mentioned in a post about blogrolls as an example of a site that had a blogroll "a mile long," my policy is surprisingly controversial and not universally accepted.

I adopted this policy in a spirit of both self-interest and altruism. In the blogosphere links are like capital. By offering links to others, others would be more inclined to offer links to me. But I am also very grateful to those who helped me out by throwing a link my way or adding me to their blogroll when I was just starting out. Now that I am a Large Mammal, according the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, I have tried to return the favor by helping out those further down the food chain. And I also think linking to others who have linked to me is the polite thing to do. While I don't think my blogroll policy is enough to qualify me for a Nobel Peace Prize like Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh, I do hope that my efforts to spread a little love around the blogosphere makes cyberspace a little safer for democracy. I believe it was those great conservative rockers the Beatles who said, "The love you make is equal to the love you take."

I cannot take full credit for blogrollosity. My policy was inspired by two of the nicest gentleman in the blogosphere. Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice, is as generous a linker as he is a human being. He is perhaps the most promiscuous and exogamous linker in the blogosphere. Kevin Hayden, who is sadly about to leave his perch at American Street, tends to link mostly to other liberal blogs, but he is constantly linking to new and lesser-known sites. "Beating both Atrios and Kos to blogroll rebuilding, my January choices display that I intend to keep them both on our sidebars for the convenience of our readers, despite which blogs I choose to read," he commented on Amnesty Day. "I’ll also prepare meals for my friends and family that vary widely from my preferred dining selections, and let them use the remote to watch televised fluff I prefer not to waste my beautiful mind on." Both Joe and Kevin, I might add, were two of the first major blogs to link to me and have always been very supportive of my work for which I am very grateful.

A couple of years ago New York Magazine examined who linked to whom in the blogosphere and they discovered that A-list blogs tend to link mostly to other A-list blogs. This elitism strikes me as strangely un-liberal and un-democratic. Ironically, major conservative bloggers are on average more inclusive of smaller blogs than major liberal bloggers. Although I haven't made a scientific survey, I have noticed that for the most part the blogrolls on the top conservative blogs tend to be bigger than the blogrolls on top liberal blogs. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has more than 250 links. Michelle Malkin has 137. Captain's Quarters has a whopping 374. Compared with them, the blogrolls at the major liberal blogs look downright stingy. They also tend to link to a wider variety of blogs in their posts. That being said both liberals and conservatives tend to link mostly to their own ideological bedfellows.

I think that perhaps the liberal blogosphere could learn something from the conservative blogosphere. For example, there are a number of conservative communities that blogs can join which give their members numerous crosslinks. This tends to raise their profile in Technorati rankings, Truth Laid Bear rankings and in Google Page Rank. In his recent post on blogrolling Markos said, "a blogroll link isn't a major source of traffic," which may indeed be the case for his blog but not necessarily for those who get a few million fewer hits than he does. He also doesn't take into account the fact that the more links a blog has, the higher it appears in search engines. According to New York magazine, the number of links a blog has tends to correspond with how much traffic it gets.

Limiting blogrolls to a few elite blogs, also reduces the diversity. Apparently, affirmative action is good for universities, but doesn't apply to blogs. Although I am opposed to quotas and am completely colorblind, I would not be surprised if my blogroll is in fact more diverse than those of many major liberal blogs. Some bloggers of color have even learned at their peril not to rock the boat too much or risk getting delinked.

Of course, there are many liberal blogs with substantial blogrolls. Shakespeare's Sister and MyLeft Wing, for example, have very extensive blogrolls. Mike Finn at Crooks & Liars often links to smaller sites. I am sure there are many others. And there are many that have even seen fit to include a reasonable conservative like myself among their ranks. But I think the blogosphere would be better served if everyone's blogrolls were bigger and more inclusive. Bloggers often complain of the elitism of the mainstream press so it seems odd that so many blogrolls should be cordoned off with velvet ropes.

Update: Skippy fights back! PZ Myers clarifies. And a defensive Kos responds.

More Updates: The blogosphere revolts. Here are just a few of the other blogs weighing in on on the blogroll bloodletting: Polimom, My Left Wing, Kiko's House, Blue Gal, Brilliant at Breakfast, Thoughts of an Average Woman, Blah3, Mockingbird's Medley, Hot Potato Mash, Mad Kane, Chapomatic, Howard Empowered People, Instapundit, Classical Values, Mock, Paper, Scissors, Drinking Liberally in New Milford, Pen-Elayne on the Web, Three Sticks, Man Eegee, Barefoot Bum, Three Wise Men, The Apostate, Debsweb, Newshog, Spiidey, The Talking Dog, BostonJoe, Booman Tribune, The News Blog, The Field Negro, If I Ran the Zoo, The Galloping Beaver, The S.N.A.F.U. Principle, driftglass, Republic of T, Faux Real, The Debate Link, Creek Running North and Blogroll Amnesty Day Sucks.

One More Update: PZ Myers offers "Blogroll Open Enrollment Day" at Pharyngula, explaining, "Since the blogroll amnesty day earlier this month was such a flop, I thought I'd reframe it."

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Jon Swift, Atrios, Daily Kos, Moderate Voice, American Street, Instapundit, Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin, Liberal, Conservative, Blogosphere, Internet

Violent Acres: The Mother Teresa of Cyberspace

(Cartoon by MTC)
The Internet truly brings out the best in people. There are many wonderful bloggers out there who go out of their way to bring just a little more joy into the world, but in my opinion there is no one who has a bigger heart in the blogosphere than the mysterious V who writes Violent Acres. Although she took up residence in the metaverse only a few short months ago, she has already made this virtual world a better place.

V decided to start a blog with one altruistic thought in mind: to help the children. And so she immediately took up arms against the scoundrels who were doing them the most harm -- their mothers. Sexual predators and terrorists may be bad people, but they have nothing on mommybloggers, those cold-hearted harpies with a steely-eyed compulsion to screw up their kids' lives by inordinately praising them and smothering them with love. "I think it's the attention mommybloggers crave and they're so firmly addicted to it that they'll sacrifice their child's privacy and well being if it will help them reach Internet Prom Queen status a little quicker," she wrote. But how to fight villainesses like like Dooce and Sweetney? At first, V's pleading missives fell on deaf ears. But then she hit on a brilliant plan. She would have to hit these mommybloggers where it hurt, at their weakest point. So she decided to fight them by attacking their children in the most vicious ways she could imagine. When one mother wondered why her daughter was not more popular, V, in a stroke of genius, answered her by posting a picture of the woman's daughter next to a picture of a child with Down's Syndrome. What better way to demonstrate that this mother was exposing her daughter to ridicule than by ridiculing this girl herself? In a sense she is like a female Mark Foley; he didn't merely spout empty rhetoric about how dangerous the Internet could be for kids, but actually went out and proved it.

Unlike the cold and cruel world of politics, which drove out Mark Foley for his selfless efforts, the supportive and nurturing Internet welcomed V with open arms. Her traffic skyrocketed. Her ad revenue leapt into the double digits. After just a month she was an Internet star. And she didn't have to exploit her own children to grab that big brass token ring the way mommy bloggers did. Instead, she used someone else's.

So who is this Mother Teresa of cyberspace, this saintly woman who has no children of her own but goes out of her way to help the children of others? Little is known about her other than what she has told us. She is exceptionally beautiful, which is why she doesn't post photos of herself lest she make others feel insecure (coincidentally, the very same reason I have elected not to post photos of myself). She is fabulously wealthy and though she scarcely needs it, has more than doubled her income through the Google ads on her site. And she seems to feel compelled to spread the happiness she has found in life to as many people as possible by attacking those who make life miserable for the rest of us, such as nerds, fat people and smokers. She took upon herself the thankless task of informing her stepchildren that their real mother, who is a smoker, would die very soon. Someone had to do it.

Though she is a strong and formidable woman with everything going for her, she was not always this way. As a young girl she was cruelly bullied by the Heathers in her school and was only able to survive by becoming a bully herself. There was no other choice. Her strength of character has made her very popular with the boys at Digg, who dream that someday they, too, will meet a woman who can beat them up. But I'm afraid I must break the news to them that there is more than a little bravada in her claims of emotional superiority. Buried deep within her psyche is a streak of insecurity that she struggles to suppress. In reality, she is a Stuart Smalley in stilettos, tearfully affirming, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and, doggonit, people like me!" as she crushes small animals with her heels.

Like Smalley, she is now a self-help guru on a mission to help others by offering vague advice on how we can be just like her. She dispenses free financial advice that anyone can follow -- for example, quit your day job and become someone's trophy wife. She even counsels us on how to improve our sex lives. I asked Mrs. Swift if it was true that women really want to have their hair pulled and be spat on, and to my surprise, she told me that was exactly what women want, except that in her case she had just had her hair done. We're hoping to try it out next Thursday, which will be a refreshing change from the pith helmets and mosquito netting we usually use in the bedroom. I'm sure many of her male readers were happy to hear that she has been able to achieve financial success and sexual satisfaction without the help of feminism, which has just been a detriment to her efforts to achieve perfection. Why strive to be equal to men when you are clearly far superior?

It is unlikely that I would have encountered such an amazing woman as this if it weren't for the Internet. I'm sure I would not be allowed to travel in her vaunted social circles and if I were she would no doubt make fun of me in a delightfully cruel way, which would be for my own good. I can only hope that someday I will be lucky enough to achieve the deepest desire of her most dedicated fans, to be callously thrown into her virtual briar patch by being slapped down by her by her on her blog. But in this blog eat blog world, Violent Acres is a four-star restaurant that serves the finest in cannibal cuisine and only a select few can get reservations.

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Jon Swift, Violent Acres, Mommybloggers, Dooce, Sweetney,Feminism, Blogosphere, Internet, Digg, Dragonlady's World OTA, Perri Nelson's Open Trackbacks