Scoble writes about advertisers pressuring Google to devalue webloggers, a Must-Read according to Dave.  I agree.  My own post (in March something) about the effects of blogs on Google PageRanking algorithm is here.

While I am a blogger, I want Google to either provide separate search service for blogs (maybe combine it with News) or reduce the weights for blogs.  PageRank bias for ndividual item or date pages don't seem to be too bad.  It's the main page that cause most of the problem because it:

• changes too fast – by the time you find it on Google, previously indexed content is gone.
• heavy with links unrelated to content – blogrolls, etc.
• covers wide range of topics

One simple solution is for blog tool developers and services to voluntarily 'mark' main blog pages by adding a META tag with NOINDEX attribute by default.  This solution:

• removes the need for Google to identify blog pages
• is not Google-specific
• works with Google as it is now
• requires bloggers to intentionally unbalance PageRanking

I wish there was a standard way to do the same at block level to hide blogrolls on item or date pages, but this solution will do until W3C provides us with a way to specify NOINDEX at block-level.

Lets face it, Blogland is as flat as LA and sprawls like it too.  Hotspots, quiet neighborhoods, noisy industrial areas, linked together by freeways and byways.  If today's Blogland is LA, tommorrow's Blogland will look like NY with skyscapers reaching for the sky.  By a skyscraper, I mean a nested group of blogs forming a hierarchical structure.  From little two story buildings for startups to equivalents of Empire State building for mega-corporations.

I started with my observation that, while hierarchical structures are common in the real world, this is not the case in the Blogland.  The real world is populated by individuals, but groups tend to form a hierarchy.  To project these groups into Blogland, we need hierarchical blogs.  I chose skyscrapers as a metaphor to deliver the idea more vividly.

As a company gets larger, flow and storage of information becomes crucial.  Blogging technologies can help in this area, but typically chaotic network of blogs could do more harm than help.  A CEO is not likely to know about about, let alone subscribe to, a lowly QA engineer's blog.  Noises generated in a large network of employee blogs also needs to be managed.

Introducing hierarchy to a blog network will help us solve these problems.  Exactly how this can be done remains to be solved, but I am absolutely convinced that this is where blogging technology is heading.  If we can raise productivity with blogging technologies, companies will pay.  I believe introduction of hierarchy is the first step.

Update: My zealot-style of writing can sometime work against me, so I thought I should clarify that I am not proposing absolute hierarchy for blogs, just adding hierarchy to what is already there to reflect real world structures.  This helps orient bloggers in the group and eases understanding of built-in information flow (up, down, sideway, etc.).

Interesting string of comments to Ming the Mechanic's post referring to my Misgivings about Social Software post [via Ray Ozzie's post about superconductive relationships].  I particularly liked this comment made by Ming.

"Maybe it is exactly what we need. That we're able to group together into drastically different realities. As opposed to us all arriving at some kind of uniform agreement about everything. I am pretty sure that we need lively, creative diversity, as opposed to bland uniformity.

But the fears that it brings up is if it enables people to walk around together in what might be perceived as more negative or dysfunctional realities. Such as violent, hate-based, mis-informed communities who start taking action based on their shared beliefs.

So, maybe better social software would allow the ku-klux klan to organize better, and to feed itself with self-supporting information. Maybe it will enable gangs of delusional teens who think the world is a dungeon where you shoot Nazi's with bigger and bigger guns. But I think I'll lean towards believing that the larger effects of better communication will more than balance out the potentially dangerous aspects.

Powerful social software might allow a small group of people to work closely together on some nefarious plot. But it might also allow millions of other people to work together on rendering such a plot useless. "

BTW, Blogland sure is a bewildering place, but services like Technorati helps quite a bit.  Using Technorati, I found people discussing my post around the globe .  Too bad, I can only read in English and Korean.

Many folks have commented on my misgivings about Social Software.  Since comments are second-class citizens in blogland, I hoisted them into a story.  There are some true gems there.

Yesterday, Dave Winer commented on Dave Sifry's Technorati API only to get a lecture from Tim Bray on REST and SOAP.  Today, Dave wrote a rather long rant which basically boils down to "Sit down Professor, I was complaining about the pain in my butt, not the Meaning of Life."

"When I wrote it, I was aware that some people would immediately jump to the conclusion that it was an anti-REST rant, and then ram a baseball bat up my butt to punish me. So I carefully wrote it so that if someone actually bothered to read it, they would realize that I was presenting the results of an engineering project."

Nicely put.  If someone rams a baseball bat up your butt, you have at least one good news: you have a good chance of keeping the bat.  I mean, who would want it back?  ROFL.

I guess I qualitfy as a social software developer since some of the software I write and dream about helps people communicate with and inform each other.  As an engineer, I am drawn to social software.  Social software's potential for changing people's lives is exciting.  Its relative unexplored nature, like the wild wild west, is also exciting.  I believe social software will achieve its technical goals, allowing people to form new social structures online.

Still, I have misgivings about whether the social software's broader goal to improve human societies will be met.  Even worse, I fear the opposite.  Social software could fragment human societies into clusters with sharply contrasting views of reality.  My fear stems from my observation of Korean society.

Korea is emerging as one of the most advanced Internet nation in the world.  Young Koreans, in particular, live and breath Internet, each belonging to large number of online communities.  One would expect them to be well informed and objective, yet they are not.  Their views are warped and often radical.  While all the world's information is at their fingertip, they consume information subjectively and produce misinformation biased by their views.  Adding highly effective social software to this is frightening to me.

When I was last in Korea, a close friend of mine told me he was thinking about sending his six-year old daughter to schools in the US.  I was shocked.  How could he think this way?  He said he initially thought the idea ridiculous, but he changed his mind after talking with people he knew, people who are just as well-to-do as his family.  Apparently, they are all thinking the same thing and this warped his common sense.

In a sense, social clusters form gravity wells which has its own local physical laws and is difficult to escape from.  Social softwares make it easier to create and grow such clusters.  There is nothing intrinsically good or bad about social software.  Like a gun, its just a tool.  Only problem is that this gun can put holes in our societies, holes like Al-Queda.  Does this mean I am against social software?  No.  I don't think development of social software can be stopped. 

What I do want my fellow social software developers to do is to think about negative impacts of social software and try to come up with mechanisms that could minimize that threat.