Lessons I Learned from Blogcritics.org
Earlier in the summer I signed up with blogcritics.org, which provides an excellent mechanism to generate decent online content with the incidental benefit of increasing traffic to a contributor’s blog—a win-win situation. Here’s how it works: If you have a blog and you like to review things like CD’s, DVD’s, movies, concerts, websites, cultural events, or (in my case) books, then you can sign up with Blogcritics. If they like your blog, then they’ll invite you to post your reviews on their site. You post the same review on your own blog. For each post, you get a link to your blog and you post a link to Blogcritics. This business of mutual links allows all boats to rise in the pond of google rankings.
Thus far I’ve posted six book reviews (I’d post more but I’m a slow reader) and along the way I’ve discovered a couple of things that might best be described as evidence of the power of sycophancy.
1. A Book Reviewer is sometimes a whore.
At Blogcritics, the book reviews work like this: publishers (or sometimes the authors) send a note or a press release and request a review. The requests get posted in a database on a user’s group. If you see a book that looks interesting, then you request the review. Once Blogcritics gives the OK, you contact the publisher and they mail you a review copy. (For a bibliophile, getting free books like this is almost as good as sex.) When the book arrives, the first thing I do is read all the comments on the dust jacket, things written by authoritative voices like the New York Times or the Atlantic Monthly or Joyce Carol Oates. Then I read the inside covers. Who writes this shit? I ask myself. Then I start reading the words the author actually wrote to see if they live up to the expectations generated by the words on the cover.
I confess that I enjoy doing book reviews. What I enjoy most is the contact I have with the authors. Of course, F.X. Toole didn’t bother to contact me since he died before the novel was finished. And in the case of Jill, not even the call of sycophancy could keep me from labelling it a wretched effort. I wrote as much and this prompted its author to tell me that I am sick and need professional help. Oh well. I was tempted to respond by telling him that even his personal insults lack imagination but chose, instead, this backhanded way of answering his harangue. But I’ve had delightful feedback from Anna Rabinowitz and Charlotte Forbes. See my earlier reviews of their respective works.
Nevertheless, as I read the last sentence of a book and then ask of myself: what approach I should take in my review, I become acutely aware that most likely one of my readers will be the author. As a teenager, when I first discovered the world of novels, especially science fiction novels by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaace Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Frederick Pohl, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, and Robert A. Heinlein, I tended to idealize the author and the process of authorship. I still want very much to treat authors as remote and detached from the petty struggles that grip us lowly readers as we try to understand the words we encounter. For a reviewer, an idealized view of things is helpful; if authors are godlike and impervious, then not even a bad review can touch them. But we live in a demystified world. The Arian heresy has crept even into the faith of letters. Now, our authors are more human than godlike. If we prick them, do they not bleed? Or at least send us angry emails? Aware that the author is watching, almost looking over my shoulder as I write the review, I find myself tempted to distort things, to assume the best where the quality of the writing is ambiguous, to overlook minor lapses. This temptation is compounded in my case because I like to be liked. I want desperately for people to be pleased with my review.
But my objectivity is compromised, too, by my vanity. I fancy myself an “undiscovered talent.” One day, I say to myself, I will write a novel. But when my publisher looks for favourable comments to decorate the new book, all the writers will run the other way. They’ll remember the nasty reviews and harsh words. If I write many good reviews now, I will effectively be making deposits to my credit in the Review Bank. A healthy balance will guarantee me good reviews when it comes time to make a withdrawal. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But consider the books I have reviewed. Who praised them? On the back of The Wanton Sublime, a volume of poetry by Anna Rabinowitz, we have praise from Claudia Rankine, Bin Ramke and Susan Wheeler. Well, who are these people? A cursory look at their web sites and cv’s will show them up for who they really are—poets. And we all know what Aristotle said about poets. So how can we trust them? This demonstrates how the whole comment-on-the-dust-jacket business is fraught with concerns about conflict of interest. The people most qualified to comment on a book also happen to be the author’s colleagues. Professional ethics demands that they write reliable snippets of wisdom, but pragmatic interests demand that they be nice about it. It’s a regular Scylla and Charybdis.
2. An online Book Reviewer is an even bigger whore.
Books still live mostly in print, and in the world of print, the payment for a good review is the promise of reciprocation: you say nice things about me; I’ll say nice things about you. But in the world of cyber reviews, payment arrives in the form of links. I want my website to rank higher on search engines, and one of the ways to improve rankings is the get other sites to link to my site. It’s even better if one of the sites linking to my site is already highly ranked. So I whore myself for the link. But Blogcritics whores itself too. When one of its stories gets syndicated to a news outlet (like digg, for example), the story’s position is determined by the number of readers who vote for it. A story ranked number 1 on digg also improves the rank of the site that contributed the feed. So how do stories rise to number 1 on digg? On the strength of the journalism? On the merit of the writing? No. In the case of stories from Blogcritics, contributors are encouraged to login in and vote for stories from Blogcritics. In cyberland, all the ballot boxes are stuffed and vote–rigging is just the way things get done. You think getting ranked number 1 on google is an index of reliable journalism? Think again. It’s an index of influence.
3. In the world of search engine ranking, influence is driven, not by money, not by knowledge, but by porn and spam.
It’s an evolving game of cat–and–mouse. Porn sites and spammers figure out how to drive traffic to their sites, search engines find ways to thwart them, and legitimate content providers try to figure out how to take advantage of the changes before the porn sites and spammers do. That means that sites like Blogcritics have to have dynamic plans for growth. Today, part of their business model involves rewarding content providers with links. This assumes that search engines value links in their ranking algorithms. But spammers and spam bloggers (sploggers) are creating link farms. Google will devalue links or try to find a way to distinguish legitimate cross–linking from all the crap. And then Blogcritics may have to find other ways to reward contributors. In the same way, my blogging software by Serendipity generates archived entries with improbable names like “Lessons-I-Learned-From-Blogcritics.html”. Unfortunately, sploggers are registering domain names and using URLs that are loaded with key search words separated by dashes. No doubt, search engines will have to respond by devaluing domain names and URLs with dashes, which means that my legitimate but lengthy URLs may, in the future, be treated by search algorithms as if they are spam sites. The result of this cat–and–mouse game is that everybody has to stoop to the level of the spammer; in order to attract traffic to legitimate and useful web sites, you have to think like a porn provider. Get on your back and start putting out.
Post script:
I’m amazed and amused at the volume of religious spam I get. Is this really what our benediction means by “Go out into the world”? Is spam the future of evangelization? Do evangelical Christians really think they should get the word out at any cost—even at the cost of credibility and authenticity?
To be fair, many of the sites promoted by religious spam are well-meaning and display legitimate content. Clearly, the site owners have paid marketing firms to promote the sites, but have not bothered to ask for the precise details of the “online marketing strategy” they have purchased.