Blogchalking

July 8, 2002 10:22 PM

Blogchalking A good idea for mapping weblogs.
posted by ig (14 comments total)

Would this be a meta-meme?
posted by SpecialK at 10:50 PM on July 8, 2002

Ouch
posted by crasspastor at 11:23 PM on July 8, 2002

isn't there somewhere else to put this post?
posted by yonderboy at 11:29 PM on July 8, 2002

Oh, geez.

But anyway...Google – which I mention because they did – ignores the META tag.
Would the bit with the alt text on the image circumvent that?
posted by Su at 11:35 PM on July 8, 2002

I was about to say the same thing. If the blogchalk creator doesn't know that Google ignores the META tag, then how much faith can be put in the rest of the principle?
posted by kfury at 11:41 PM on July 8, 2002

Manchalking.
posted by pracowity at 12:03 AM on July 9, 2002

kfury and Su, if I remember correctly, google ignores most common meta tags, due to obvious abuse. He's kind of setting up a new, weird meta tag, though as far as I know google doesn't put much stock in meta tags, so I don't know how effective it might become (somewhere in search engine optimization forums, you can see supporting evidence for these claims).

This idea also seems a lot like the blogger code, except with a doodle instead of a code string.
posted by mathowie at 12:34 AM on July 9, 2002

And as a nice follow-up to the previous post, ALT text of an image or link doesn't get displayed on mouse-over with Mozilla 1.0, leaving Moz users out of the game (or at least that part of it). (Do either Opera or Netscape do tooltip-with-ALT? I don't recall.) The attempt at elegance is appreciated, but it doesn't work the way this person expects it to.

Do we have a name yet for establishing search engine signposts in this manner? It's not exactly Google Bombing...
posted by dan_of_brainlog at 12:43 AM on July 9, 2002

There was some good discussion of the practicality of using metadata vs. categorization in weblogs in this blogroots thread.
posted by vacapinta at 12:47 AM on July 9, 2002

I was trying to do some chalkchalking earlier today at work but unfortunately my brain exploded.


...it got better.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:33 AM on July 9, 2002

I'll chime in again and say that if this is done, I'd like to see this done right.

Ideally, the location metatag in your weblog would not rely upon something so unstandardized as location names. Is the name of your country in English or in the native language? If you live in a suburb, should you choose the nearest metropolitan area?

For major cities in the world, this is certinly more scalable than waiting for someone to build myhometownbloggers.com but I cant help but notice that this is a spatial data problem incompatibe with the tools available in a semantic web. Even if you used GPS co-ordinates in your location tag, you could never query Google to ask: Show me weblogs within 30 miles of where I live.
posted by vacapinta at 1:39 AM on July 9, 2002

What's wrong with this place:

http://gob.phaeba.net/location/australia.html
posted by krisjohn at 1:41 AM on July 9, 2002

Sigh...yeah, you could predict it.
Google also gives less weight to "non-front" pages. Which gives this solution an effective lifespan of about a week, in general, before it becomes less and less relevant, besides the more technical considerations Vacapinta brought up.
This seems to rely on information that's generally in people's about pages, anyway, and often as a little sidebar blurb on every page.
Somebody has some serious research to do.

But I kind of question the use of these spatial associations for web sites, anyway. I can't recall having become interested in a site based upon its geography as any sort of factor. Lack of geographical attachment is part of the point of the web.
posted by Su at 9:13 AM on July 9, 2002

Got a note from the blogchalking creator today. He asked me to post it here, since he can't get a MeFi membership:

I really didn't know that search engines, because of searchtools spamming, are paying less attention to META tags. In fact, they read the META tags, but compare them to the sites's frontpage content. If the keywords are in the content, the robot associate them in a way to create to give more emphasis to that words. So, I invented a solution that's already working on BlogChalking - with the META tags and the Icon, the blogger publishes a post with the keywords, so they will be in the content.

Now I'm building an more effective solution - the keywords will be always on the frontpage, just under the Icon, but with a too little font to be seen.

What do you think? Got any idea to solve this, too?

posted by kfury at 4:42 PM on July 9, 2002