Blogs get around…
Source: Wired 02.08 “The Secret Life of a Blog Post: Mapping the journey from servers to scrapers to suits – to the world.”
It seems fitting to acknowledge this article when my medium is a blog. This is not even close to a lesson on the technicalities of a blog, but an interesting jaunt through a surprising amount of databases. Following is a list and breif explanation of all of the friends a blog makes.
-Text Scrapers: bots looks for text to use elsewhere (i.e. listpics and spam)
-DataMiners: analysts gather demographics on countless topics (i.e. for polls and marketing)
-Search Engines: post is indexed and searchable by keyword
-Spam Blogs: scraped text is dumped into spam blogs to fool search engines
-Corporations: use data miners’ information to evaluate their business plan
-Ad Servers: contextual ad networks scan for keywords; then they may insert an advertisement
-Aggregators: algorithms analyze who’s linking to what and determine “what’s hot”
-Social Bookmarks: readers critique your blog
-Online Media: other bloggers and news sites may link to your post – if they like it
…and of course…
-Readers: they write comments or join the discussion and set off ping servers, starting the whole process over again!
Wow! Exhausting to even think of the journey this post is getting ready to embark on.
