Meta mania, part two

The other day, I told you that I had found a "couple" of items of interest regarding this blog, and that the first was the batshit crazy fundie whackjob in Wyoming who called Blast Off! "virtually irrelevant." Well, the second item might put that "irrelevant" charge to the test just a bit ... and I happen to think it's pretty cool.

A Dutch graduate student, Esther Weltevrede, conducted a study of blogs last fall and posted it in her "New Media Research Blog." In attempting to "deconstruct[ ] the infrastructure of a Google bomb," she discovered that Google effectively had defused the bombs by changing their algorithms, and so tagging and linking have become more effective platforms for determining the provenance and effect of a given website or page.

The cool part is that Ms. Weltevrede used http://www.whitehouse.gov/president for her case study. And guess what she found?

Marking systems such as tagging and linking (with the anchor texts to mark the link) have become increasingly popular for user-generated categorization and recommendation on the web. ‘Many minds,’ as collectives of space or device users are called, use anchor texts to mark resources such as web pages. How is the technical feature of the anchor text used? What do the markers for Bush’s personal page in the blogosphere tell us about the politics many minds in that sphere? What anchor text with the purpose of a Google bomb do many minds in the blogosphere use?

For this project Technorati results for query “www.whitehouse.gov/president” where scraped for all anchor text using the Technorati Scraper. The resulting tag cloud shows both the ‘miserable failure’ Google bomb, as well as a new one: ‘Drunky McStagger.’


Some initial findings concerning politics of many minds in this research are that the two of the most used markers ‘Drunky McStagger’ and ‘miserable failure’ tell us two things. First of all the many minds are expressing their opinion of Bush by collectively qualifying him as a miserable failure and Drunky McStagger. Secondly, and this influences the first, many minds have an agenda of targeting Google and other search engine’s recommendation of websites in search results. Although collectively many minds find it important enough to mark Bush’s personal page with these terms, they might just as well have humorous as political intentions. Looking at the tag cloud in more detail however, a wide range of negative anchor texts is used to qualify Bush’s personal page, also markers that are used by only two or three people. Apart from neutral descriptive markers such as ‘President Bush,’ the number of negative anchor texts dominates over positive ones. The popularity of negative anchor text for Bush tells us something about the tone in the blogosphere surrounding Bush.

Yesterday's Google bomb has become today's tag cloud, and thus "Drunky McStagger," which Blast Off! has used consistently to identify the Preznit since this sucky blog's inception in 2004 (as a routine Google search will reflect), has joined "miserable failure" as an iconic description of the nominal (if not functional) leader of the Bush crime syndicate. Blast Off! may not have coined the term, it's true, but it clearly popularized it.

I got yer "virtually irrelevant" right here, pal. Heh.

I'd like to thank the Academy ... and now it's time to work on "Huggy Bear."