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
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> > Subscriber's Corner at
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> > 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
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>
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**********
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