Here’s a little behind the scenes look into the world of blogging: Sometimes, you’ll go onto Google Trends to see what people are searching in the United States, and then you’ll switch the view to what Canada is searching (and you’ll laugh a little because what silly things are the Canadians up to besides what we’re up to, they’re looking for information on Tina Turner’s death just like their larger, more chaotic neighbors to the south), and you’ll notice that 18th on Canada’s list is Jimmy Carter, and you’ll realize you didn’t see him anywhere on the United States’ list! It will turn out that you were wrong, and that he was on the United States’ list, that he was 9th on that list, that Americans are searching for Jimmy Carter much more than Canadians are and you just didn’t see it. It will also turn out, though, that learning this won’t stop you from wondering, for a minute, whether there are Canadians out there trying to dance on Jimmy Carter’s grave.
It seems that the latest news regarding Jimmy Carter is that Jimmy Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, did an interview with the Associated Press yesterday, and that said interview got aggregated to the moon. You can read an account of the interview on People’s website. You can read the exact same account on the Canadian version of Yahoo Sports. You can read other accounts in other places, but they’re all from the same interview. Everyone on this big wide internet, at least in North America, is trying to get Jimmy Carter clicks from the same guy’s work. Even us! That’s why I went on Google Trends! “Shit, I should really get a blog post up, I hate how the site looks when it’s only the bets and the brackets, is there anything people are googling that I should know about?”
This is an understated way the internet has gone off the rails. In a reasonable system, anyone who thought it worthwhile to share the Jason Carter interview would just link to it from their website, maybe with a highlight or an additional thought. Not ours, though. With ours, the race to capture the most search engine traffic from a piece of loosely-defined news means we get the same information shaped in 35 different ways, the professional equivalent of high school kids paraphrasing their asses off to dodge the plagiarism police. It’s so much noise, and it’s so much hopping onto other people’s work.
People say this is changing, and they say it’s changing for two reasons. First, the listicle movement flipped over its handlebars, doomed in the short term by a dozen different shortcuts which were all some version of, “The best way to get consistent readership is to build a consistent following of individual people, and listicles were not doing that.” Second, ChatGPT and its counterparts might upend search engines? The ChatGPT thing is scary for a lot of bloggers—The Barking Crow gets a lot of search engine traffic, though less through the aggregation game and more by having the best damn license plate rankings on the web. But if it and the rest doom this industry of just turning other people’s ideas into republished owl pellets, maybe it’ll be good for us, or at least our souls if not our wallets.
Back in high school, one of my English classes took a few weeks soft-pedaling an introduction to us of the concept that the internet is the modern equivalent of the printing press, a vast opening up of access to those wishing to communicate broadly. I wonder if people did this aggregation stuff with the printing press in its mediumly early days. Am I describing newspapers? The AP wire? I don’t quite think I quite am.
In another behind the scenes look into the world of blogging, we blogger often have got other jobs, and I’ve got to go tutor now. Jimmy Carter’s still alive, if that’s what you were looking for. God bless him.
