Is commercialism killing the Blogosphere

I took part in the first round of Love to Lead and now the last, because this week’s question is rather topical: Is Commercialism Killing the Blogosphere?

It’s ironic that this ties into a competition to promote laptops. Given that I’m utterly sick of Windows Vista (and I haven’t even managed to install it yet – just try ordering the upgrade) I can say I’ve no interest in sucking up to Toshiba to win. In fact I should be strongly against commerciality. I’ve discovered this site is being scraped by splogs and being used to advertise illicit antiquities, or other illegal goods through Google Ads. For instance if I talk about heritage problems in North Cyprus here then there’s a good chance these words will be taken by someone else and used to advertise illegally sold properties in North Cyprus (check the ads on Google). As it happens this advertising isn’t illegal everywhere so I don’t think it’s Google’s job to impose US law on the internet. I’ve said before this isn’t necessarily Google being evil, but that doesn’t stop it being a problem. Knowing you’re going to get ripped off is a big disincentive to post, but not all commercialism is bad.

Scienceblogs a project run by SEED magazine has been a great success. I was concerned when I first heard about it. Seed was signing up various leading science bloggers to post on their site, with the intention of splitting advertising revenue. One concern was that this would form a bit of a clique, and the other that the various bloggers could be sanitised. Neither of these things have come to pass. In fact it’s increased readership for some deserving bloggers and the occasional storms of insults there reveal that far from being sanitised, some of the bloggers revel in their insanity. Ok, so that’s a very obviously commerical site, but you simply cannot escape the commerical world elsewhere.

I’m currently blogging at WordPress.com and I wondered how they made money because I never saw any adverts. I’ve found out that you can see adverts if you arrive at this page from Google. Hence, while I’m not making money out of my site someone is so this is a commercial site. It’s one of many such sites. Google has massively empowered people to blog with the Blogger platform. Love it or loathe it it’s has a huge effect on the dynamics of blogging, but I cannot believe it was bought and further developed as an act of charity. Before blogging was a major activity free web hosting was miserly unreliable and strewn with adverts. Compared to 1997, internet companies have generally massively improved their offerings and it is profit driven, so a purely aesthetic anti-commercial stance smacks of elitism to me. Which brings me to Love to Lead.

I’ve been following this with interest, and while I’ve not taken part much I have been quietly impressed by the idea. If you’re taking the competition aspect seriously (and I’m not, please don’t vote for me) then it is flawed. To an extent the set-up of the competition is more about getting large numbers of people to vote regardless rather than the quality of the blog entry. If you want the competition to be sensible then you’ll be disappointed. However as an idea it’s really innovative. The idea of opening discussion between people who wouldn’t normally be reading each other blogs is an example of really connecting with bloggers. Despite the competitive pressures, I have found some interesting sites to view through Love to Lead. There needs to be a rethink of how it works, but I think there is merit in the idea. If after reading this this you go off and read someone else’s blog entry, then you’re showing that a commercial site can be a positive influence. Now go and vote for Joseph McCrumble who tackles L2L in greater depth.