thanks
g
On Sep 19, 2005, at 8:04 AM, Sue Thomas wrote:
> Hi George
> The blog is completely public and widely publicised. The signing in
> is for those who are actually on the writing team, like yourself, who
> need to log on to the admin interface to create posts.
> best
> Sue
>
>
> On 19/09/05, George P.Landow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Since this is a private group blog that requires members to sign in,
>> why would we want it to be easy to find on Google?
>>
>> gpl
>>
>> On Sep 19, 2005, at 6:04 AM, Millie Niss wrote:
>>
>>> I have twice in recent days (since I just moved between my two homes,
>>> and
>>> don't have access yet to my old internet bookmarks and old mail)
>>> Googled the
>>> WDL blog to try to find it. I was alarmed to discover that it is
>>> quite hard
>>> to find the blog on Google. The first few results (if one gives
>>> search
>>> terms such as "thomas", "digital" and so forth in addition to "WDL",
>>> which
>>> has many other meanings) are references to the blog, but most are
>>> from
>>> discussions of the blog before it ever existed, so they do not lead
>>> to
>>> the
>>> blog's address. The correct blog link is somewhere well down on the
>>> list,
>>> and is only there at all with certain choices of search terms (I had
>>> to try
>>> several to find the right ones).
>>>
>>> I don't know if Sue can do anything to make the blog easier to find
>>> on
>>> Google -- as you know, getting good search engine results for sites
>>> is
>>> now
>>> an entire profession although the tricky part is supposed to be
>>> making
>>> the
>>> client's website come up at the top when relevant general categories
>>> are
>>> searched; it is really unfortunate that searching for the site by its
>>> actual
>>> name doesn't work very well... But aside from what my experience
>>> means
>>> about marketing the WDL blog, it is worthwhile to consider that
>>> Google,
>>> usually much-praised for good reason -- may be the weak link in the
>>> web's
>>> status as a useful and reliable research tool.
>>>
>>> If the only way -- or at least the usual way -- to find anything on
>>> the web
>>> is to Google it, sites which are not easy to Google can simply become
>>> lost
>>> on the web. Not only won't they get new visitors who find them
>>> through
>>> Googling, they will slowly lose their old visitors because people
>>> will
>>> forget to bookmark the site and then will be unable to find it again
>>> when
>>> they want it. This is bad enough when you know the site exists and
>>> know
>>> many details about it, but in that case you can start asking around
>>> for the
>>> URL and searching in cleverer ways so you could find the site again,
>>> but if
>>> someone puts up a valuable and excellent web site that isn't widely
>>> marketed, people will not discover it if Google doesn't lead them to
>>> it.
>>>
>>> This problem wasn't quite as bad when there was more competition in
>>> the
>>> search engine market, so that if Google didn't lead you to the site,
>>> at
>>> least the people who used some other search engine might get there,
>>> and many
>>> people even used multiple search engines for the same search to get
>>> wider
>>> results, but now Google is completely dominant and many other
>>> apparently
>>> distinct search sites are actually "powered by Google" so they won't
>>> give
>>> unique results.
>>>
>>> I don't blame Google for this state of things -- it is understandable
>>> for
>>> them to try to beat their competition and they actually do provide a
>>> better
>>> service than most other search engines (and they aren't known for
>>> eliminating their competition in dishonest and/or unfair ways, the
>>> way
>>> Microsoft does), but I think it could become a really bad problem,
>>> especially regarding use of the web for academic and other serious
>>> research
>>> purposes. Too often, a web search forms the primary basis of initial
>>> research, even published research in journals, so that someone could
>>> conceivably write a survey article on something that completely
>>> omits a
>>> major point of view or even a major set of facts, if the omitted
>>> material
>>> isn't easily accessible by Google.
>>>
>>> If the researcher were instead to use a library, subject-specific
>>> databases
>>> on CD ROM, indexes to periodicals, actual journals and their indices,
>>> published collections of abstracts, and so forth they would be much
>>> less
>>> likely to miss something major because those sources of data have
>>> systematic
>>> indexing systems designed by librarians (even if the index seems much
>>> less
>>> flexible than a computer search) and are also edited by human beings
>>> so as
>>> not to omit things. (The academic field I studied was math. In
>>> math,
>>> there
>>> is a monthly publication called "Current Math Publications" and it
>>> lists
>>> every paper in many journals, so that if you search the CMP index,
>>> you
>>> will
>>> find every paper on the your topic, not just the ones which happen to
>>> accrete to search terms on Google by the secret algorithms of the
>>> Google
>>> webspiders.)
>>>
>>> I really fear that there will be an increasing number of "literature
>>> survey
>>> articles" or even supposedly scientific "meta-analyses" which purport
>>> to
>>> draw conclusions about an actual subject (not just about the state of
>>> the
>>> literature that is on the web about a subject) by analyzing what all
>>> the
>>> different papers one finds on the web say about the subject. For
>>> example,
>>> there is a respected tradition of "meta analyses" in the medical
>>> research
>>> literature, where all the studies ever done on a certain subject are
>>> collected and the results are presented in aggregate, generally with
>>> some
>>> statistical methods which are supposed to measure how reliable the
>>> results
>>> are and weight better or bigger studies more heavily in the analysis
>>> and so
>>> forth.
>>>
>>> Hopefully the mathematics improves the quality of the results, but
>>> clearly a
>>> simple minded meta analysis could yield truly worthless results.
>>> Suppose one
>>> did a meta analysis of whether internet use causes insanity. The
>>> meta
>>> analysis collects a bunch of published studies on this topic. One
>>> study
>>> might be a randomized clinical trial in which a well-balanced sample
>>> of
>>> 10,000 random people was compiled, and each person's amount of
>>> internet use
>>> was correlated with their reported episodes of mental illness and
>>> also
>>> with
>>> the results of a standardized psychiatric examination. A second
>>> study
>>> might
>>> be a study of 10 psychotic murderers (out of a bigger group of 30
>>> psychotic
>>> murderers where the 10 were the ones who consented to be interviewed)
>>> whom
>>> an untrained investigator has asked whether or not they liked to go
>>> online
>>> before committing their crimes.
>>>
>>> The simpleminded meta alanysis would try to make a standard coding
>>> for
>>> all
>>> the studies (all two of them in my example) and would consider that
>>> the
>>> aggregate results of the studies was equivalent to a single larger
>>> study of
>>> the total number of subjects (10,010 in our example). Of course in
>>> our
>>> example the two studies are not at all comparable -- even though they
>>> purport to answer the same question. Our results would not be total
>>> garbage
>>> only because the second, much less reliable study used many fewer
>>> subjects,
>>> so it counts for less in the final statistics. But the result of the
>>> meta-analysis would be substantially LESS reliable than the results
>>> of
>>> the
>>> better study. (Note that the 10 psychotic murderers would mess up
>>> the
>>> results more than proportionally to their number, because they are
>>> cases of
>>> actual insanity and many of them may have been internet users -- as
>>> many
>>> people in any sample are -- whereas out of the 10,000 people there
>>> would be
>>> maybe 100 psychotic people and perhaps no people AS psychotic as the
>>> psychotic murdereres, and the study method would also fail to
>>> identify
>>> many
>>> people who really were psychotic despite being well-designed.)
>>>
>>> Thus we can see that a simpleminded meta analysis will give very
>>> lousy
>>> results. But a respectable meta-analysis has a systematic way off
>>> compiling
>>> the studies it uses, for example every study published in every issue
>>> of a
>>> large group of journals during a fiuxed time period is included. It
>>> is
>>> hoped that by looking only at (supposedly) reliable sources for the
>>> studies,
>>> and then by including all of them that meet the set criteria, one
>>> exercises
>>> some quality control over the studies and does not omit important
>>> results,
>>> and also it is thought that problems with one study that alter the
>>> results
>>> in one direction will be balanced out by errors in other studies that
>>> cause
>>> an opposite bias. I find the whole process to be rather suspect and
>>> can see
>>> a lot to criticize in it, but the point is that there is an accepted
>>> methodology for doing these meta analyses, and it tries to address
>>> all
>>> the
>>> major problems with the process.
>>>
>>> Now imagine that the meta analysis gets all the studies it uses by a
>>> Google
>>> search. You can immediately see that there will be big problems if
>>> Google
>>> leaves out a lot of important stuff, overrepresents other things, and
>>> so
>>> forth. The method I am describing (especially using Google) sounds
>>> so
>>> terrible that it may be hard to believe that anyone would consider it
>>> to be
>>> a valid type of medical research, but unfortunately this is really
>>> the
>>> case,
>>> and some of the studies really do use internet searches. This, then,
>>> is a
>>> case where Google's faults could lead to people getting the wrong
>>> medical
>>> treatments, if decisions are made using results of meta analyses.
>>> (Fortunately, most medical authorities don't rely much on these kinds
>>> of
>>> studies, but they are increasingly being performed and published,
>>> precisely
>>> because the internet makes these studies easy to do!)
>>>
>>> Millie Niss
>>>
>>> **********
>>>
>>> * Visit the Writing and the Digital Life blog
>>> http://writing.typepad.com
>>> * To alter your subscription settings on this list, log on to
>>> Subscriber's Corner at
>>> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/writing-and-the-digital-life.html
>>> * To unsubscribe from the list, email [log in to unmask] with a
>>> blank subject line and the following text in the body of the message:
>>> SIGNOFF WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE
>>>
>>>
>> George P. Landow
>> Professor of English and the History of Art
>> Brown University
>>
>> www.landow.com
>>
>> **********
>>
>> * Visit the Writing and the Digital Life blog
>> http://writing.typepad.com
>> * To alter your subscription settings on this list, log on to
>> Subscriber's Corner at
>> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/writing-and-the-digital-life.html
>> * To unsubscribe from the list, email [log in to unmask] with a
>> blank subject line and the following text in the body of the message:
>> SIGNOFF WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE
>>
>
>
> --
> http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com
>
> **********
>
> * Visit the Writing and the Digital Life blog
> http://writing.typepad.com
> * To alter your subscription settings on this list, log on to
> Subscriber's Corner at
> http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/writing-and-the-digital-life.html
> * To unsubscribe from the list, email [log in to unmask] with a
> blank subject line and the following text in the body of the message:
> SIGNOFF WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE
>
>
George P. Landow
Professor of English and the History of Art
Brown University
www.landow.com
**********
* Visit the Writing and the Digital Life blog http://writing.typepad.com
* To alter your subscription settings on this list, log on to Subscriber's Corner at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/writing-and-the-digital-life.html
* To unsubscribe from the list, email [log in to unmask] with a blank subject line and the following text in the body of the message: SIGNOFF WRITING-AND-THE-DIGITAL-LIFE
|