Bernie mentions the latest in a long list of feed spam, this time from Labour. It’s bad enough with the mundane rewritten press releases on some of their “blogs” but now we have Labour HQ polluting what was I thought our community noticeboard with press releases. We also have their flickr feed popping up photos of politicians and political wannabes all with their labour buttons or whatever.
It’s not just Labour though. Now we see daily posts about CSO statistics. It’s a feed not a damned blog. We have “blogs” giving us fashion advice. We have gossip tabloids now as well for the prissy and vapid demographics. What once was a great community site has now turned into a Las Vegas strip with many “blogs” being nothing more than audience traps to collect ad revenue. The passionate blogs are now being smothered with smiling TDs and Indymedia hippy rants.
I’ve just stopped reading it – it takes too long and is too confusing.
I actually subscribed to the CSO feed for a while in bloglines – it was mildly interesting to begin, but when they kept notifying me about monthly changes in the total number of cattle slaughtered, I simply couldn’t keep up.
And then there’s that American blog that advertised Irish music acts that I’d love to go see and then realise they’re in Carolina or someplace.
It’s Kansas actually.
But the gigs are equally as inaccessible from Ireland.
That’s the problem with such an open and non-discriminatory site. People will abuse it.
The Indymedia crap is annoying me the most; I flick through my Irishblogs.ie feed and look out for either bloggers that I usually like or else topics that interest me in some way; I keep falling into their commie-rants when I see a title that gets my attention (which turns out to be a pointless rant).
Maybe someone should launch an aggregator for actual blogs; one that can cut out the press releases and stuff (perhaps readers can report it)?! I’m sure that’s against the principals of net neutrality but it will at least stop freeloaders making money off other people’s work.
It happened with football blogs as well. There are sites which just publish headlines wrapped in Google ads just to make money while those with decent content suffer because they’re tagged the same way (weblog) on the newsfeeds.
Then there is all that crap from Cork people. Like who cares about Sean Og Alpain. (Being from tipp and considering last Sundays results I probably should have been quiet But) 🙂
I agree there is a lot of crap. I just have everything in livebook marks in firefox.
Any chance of an invite only aggegrator.
Am sure Roger will be along with a solution, he has a fix.
Yeah, since when was Indymedia a blog?
I was sure it was a haven for middle-class, chattering mongos with an inflated sense of self-importance.
First of all I have no idea who registered indymedia on irishblogs.ie, it wasn’t me and I wouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t brought up on any of our lists and I suspect that whoever did it was not connected to indymedia.
Having said that, picking out indymedia as being particularly objectionable is a strongly ideological take and isn’t really based on any objective criteria as to what amounts to a blog. I think that the commercial and party-political output is far more problematic. In terms of the DIY, amateur, personal and non-commercial aspects of blogging, indymedia fits the bill far closer than much of the spam. I think that singling us out as particularly alien to the blogosphere is mostly based upon a dislike of the political positions that we carry.
Still, I check irishblogs from time to time and I think that it is becoming increasingly less useful as more and more non-blogs move into its space. I include indymedia in that, by the way. We have been in perpetual struggle with the population of the internet, to try to persuade people to post material that is vaguely newsworthy and written for a wide audience and I don’t think that presenting the site as a blog is at all helpful in that struggle 🙂
Every new means of mass communication, from usenet to bulletin boards to wikipedia, has relatively quickly come under attack from spam – political, commercial or whatever – and the ones that have prospered are those that have come up with organisational schemes to counteract it. I think that the irishblogs administrators need to come up with some more rigid criteria for approving what is a blog. I also think that this would be most successful if the criteria were as transparently and objectively applied as possible, since the definition of what amounts to a blog is not entirely straightforward, there will always be edge cases – when is the Microsoft technical blogger slipping into marketing?
I was sure it was a haven for middle-class, chattering mongos with an inflated sense of self-importance.
*C’mon twenty, if you want to move your humour up to the next level, you’re going to have to move on from simple repetition of cliches. Although they may get the easy laughs, they lack comedic insight which is what the best comedy aspires to.
*self-important, chattering put-down.
Maybe just stick a small ‘report this feed’ button on each entry, then the admin (s?) can scan reported feeds and remove them? Could have a threshold, ie. don’t show feeds reported more than twice…
Chekov,
I think what most annoys people about Indymedia’s presence on Irishblogs.ie is the rapaciously large number of articles published and subsequently appearing. People seem fine with the likes of Toirtrap – who posts at Indymedia as well, I think – because it’s only one article every so often. I clicked on Irishblogs.ie today, and had to scroll to the end of the page in order to surpass the litany of Indymedia posts.
Indymedia appears spurious on Irishblogs.ie, and I think that is to the disadvantage of both parties.
Could also have a filter system whereby a user can blacklist certain feeds and save settings.
I think what most annoys people about Indymedia’s presence on Irishblogs.ie is the rapaciously large number of articles published and subsequently appearing. People seem fine with the likes of Toirtrap – who posts at Indymedia as well, I think – because it’s only one article every so often.
I agree. Irishblogs has been degrading for a while now under the weight of spammers. I was merely arguing that those who took particular umbrage to the indymedia posts were viewing the world through anti-red tinted glasses. The labour party photo feeds, the Oasis bulletins, the CSO statistics, the political press offices and so on have all been gaining more space and that’s not really what most blog readers want to see.
I think that technical solutions such as report buttons / user preferences and so on all help, some sort of loose definition of standards that blogs are expected to adhere to is indispensible. The very fact that somebody was able to subscribe indymedia to the irishblogs feed without any of the indymedia editors knowing about signifies that the current regime is too loose.
*C’mon twenty, if you want to move your humour up to the next level, you’re going to have to move on from simple repetition of cliches. Although they may get the easy laughs, they lack comedic insight which is what the best comedy aspires to.
You’re right, Sir. As soon as I find a new way to make fun of Indymedia I’ll get right back to you.
I’ve just seen this post and it’s late at night so I’ll try to get back to it later…but indymedia was submitted and we included it. To date we’ve probably only excluded 2 or 3 blogs (out of over 1169 and counting) which have been for legal/copyright issues where certain posts were brought to our attention. At the moment I’ve an open mind on the issue. It could be reasonable to exclude a site that is over-prolific. Of course if the aministrators/owners of a site want a site removed we will do so immediately. I don’t think the problem arises solely out of non-blogs being included but also just from the increase in sheer volume of blogs means the posts move by more quickly and the likelihood of you missing a rasper from Raftery or a muse from Mulley is more likely.
In any case as the boggersphere grows the volume of post is going to increase – so we have been working on ideas to do various filters. We were going to do “technology”, “politics” and “sport” filters. We also are working on our “The buzz” section and bring that more to the fore. For those who register we do have 2 buttons “Add this blog” – and then you can look at “My Blogs” like a feed reader. Also if more people were inclined to categorise their posts it would be easier for people to filter them out. So using search, filters, the buzz, “my blogs” and categories/tags people should have some tools to help them find what they want. At the moment my thinking is that excluding sites will only put off the issue rather than resolve it and may indeed cause even more disputes – the days of a cosy coterie of bloggers may be over. As I said I’m very open on this and will take heed of comments by users and bloggers.
We could of course do an “A-list Bloggers” page. 🙂 . Now that would cause ructions. What about an “Irish Blog Awards Nominees” page? A “Tech Bloggers” page?
In fairness, there’s nothing wrong with fashion advice and celebrity gossip. Different strokes for different folks, as the nun said to the bishop.
I just subscribe to the blogs that I am interested in and more or less ignore irishblogs.ie feed entirely
I was sure it was a haven for middle-class, chattering mongos with an inflated sense of self-importance.
You’re right there, Twenty – that could never fit the description of a blog at all…
[…] Following much comment about spamming in the Irish blogosphere from Maman Poulet, Damien and Bernie, we’ve added a new “report this blog entry” feature at Planet Journals. Of course, this will require yet more human intervention but I hope that some review volunteers will help us out. […]