Well I spent some time in the nano forums making enemies again. Well, not really, there were a couple of post in Cleaning House that sethjohnson left about optimizing the nano feed aggregation. I like talking about CS related issues, but I guess the nano forms are not really the place for that. We’ll have to settle for “lolisim in Otaku culture” or “Haruhism in post-pubescent lonely males.” I think I’ll keep the CS stuff out of the nano forms, back to reddit.com.

BTW, according to South Park “pwned” is pronounced “powned.” I know you said it like that anyway, but there isn’t actually an official pronunciation from what I’ve been told.
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I was reading “Blogging 102 The Community of Peers” this morning while I should have been reviewing my latest research assignment for software engineering, but that’s beside the point. Omonomono’s (what?) post has less to do with anime than it does with blogging in general. There were a couple of aspects that he mentioned that I would like to elaborate on.

The non-animenano visitors to my blog are almost exclusively google searches. I have a few visitors from comments I leave at other blogs, but I don’t comment on every blog post I read (I used to comment a lot more than I do now). Still, when I post, the nano offers an audience that would not be there otherwise. I apologize to the two or three people that actually visit this blog on a regular basis; I didn’t mean to leave you guys out.

To quote, “I think within these sites there’s a conflict of sites who tend to “centralize” and sites that “diversify.” It’s a reflection of an instinct of people who wants to “syndicate” and people who relinquish that kind of editorial power to their readers.”

Overall, I believe, that the tendency to centralize is due largely to people being lazy. The bloggers prospective is that being on an aggregator means that the work of getting the blog name recognition is done automatically, on a per post basis. Like wise, from a reader’s point of view, the work of searching for interesting material easier. Why search each blog or compile RSS feeds when the blogs content can be laid out so easily before them. That’s not a complaint on my part, as I am the same way. Blog aggregators are great for the community, but it seems they draw a significant portion of the readers leaving fewer readers who look for blogs that are not listed.

Omonomono (seriously, what?) comments that there is still a problem with the dissenters being heard. The criticism is that those who are not listed or do not have popular ideas are still not heard. This is largely the case, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it. For sites like animenano, the blogs that are aggregated can–for the most part–say and do what they want because the site operator seems to want it that way. Other sites simply don’t list the blogs they don’t care for. Still other sites like digg and reddit use voting systems that send anything that the majority of voting visitors do not like down the pipe-hole where it is never seen or read and—most importantly—voted on (mentioned in the post).

Free thought can sometimes seem like a misnomer because how many of us actually think freely? How many have original ideas? Is it that we actually don’t like unpopular thought or is it that popular thought is more appealing? As human beings we are conditioned to seek out a group mentality. There is a natural instinct toward conformity.

So, the basic question is not how should you get an unpopular or little known idea into the collective consciousness of the people. The question should be how should you change the way people think and what they believe. The best way to do that is to centralize the content and have people come to it, or have the content so powerfully displayed in all facets that it becomes the common belief.

What I’m trying to say is that most of what we think to be true is not as “true” as we believe it to be.

Also, blog aggregators are the $hit.