A Wonderfully Articulate Article — “The World Wide Wasteland”.

I’m passionate about the web, information, cool websites and the user.  Always have been. An article posted by Zemanta I just read has summed up what I’ve been thinking about the last couple of months, I couldn’t have articulated it better. Remember the days of good old blogging, linking to other blogs and re-sharing articles with other friendly bloggers?

Gone are those days what what we’re left with is “The World Wide Wasteland”, says Zemanta and I couldn’t agree more. ← I really think you should read what they have to say… Now we have bots clicking on links, spammers and a plethora of other fud and nastiness on the web.

Where’s all the link love gone and why are we settling for mediocrity?  Check out the video on Vimeo.

Excerpts from the blog post below to wet your whistle:

Nobody links to other websites anymore!

Bloggers didn’t die, and neither did blogging. But somehow, it just stopped being a vast, interconnected blogosphere …
When did the blogroll die anyway? Didn’t bloggers used to have links to all the blogs they read? Didn’t they talk about each other’s posts? Didn’t they quote and even reblog each other?

Gone.

All of it, like a puff of smoke that was never really there.

How many blogs do you see with a blogroll or that link to other cool stuff these days? We don’t want to advertise anyone but ourselves nowadays. Bah…

All of this really means the death of discovery.

Now why would we want that to happen. For the life of me I can’t think of a reason

Everyone is measuring each other with klout, karma and other metrics. Your boss wants to see how many likes or followers you’re getting, where is the value? What about curating and sharing great content, something which everyone should see?

It doesn’t matter what was shared and what was seen! As long as all the graphs are going up, it means you’re doing a good job.

The web wasn’t a globally connected network anymore, it was just an endless wasteland of information pillars – ready to be explored one by one by anyone foolish enough to attempt the journey.

Reading on we come to one of my favorite passages of the article:

It doesn’t matter what was shared and what was seen! As long as all the graphs are going up, it means you’re doing a good job.

The web wasn’t a globally connected network anymore, it was just an endless wasteland of information pillars – ready to be explored one by one by anyone foolish enough to attempt the journey.

Link markets were created. Places where explorers could sell what they found in return for eternal fame as measured by something called “karma”. It was the fairest of marketplaces, good content got a lot of karma and bad content didn’t get any.

In theory, the bad explorers would eventually die out.

Instead, the marketplaces became popular. Everyone knew magnificent explorers were sharing links here and only the good content reached The Holy Front Page!

So … as is usually the case … the marketplaces grew. But they lost their touch, and many of the best explorers simply left. Only the mediocre explorers, their fans and the spam remained. Alas, it was still better than waddling the torrentous stream of Twitter and much better than roughing it out on Google.

Even this was no longer a walk in the park.

Nowadays, the only way to discover good content is somebody walking up to you saying Hey, there’s something good here!

If you’ve waded through the blockquotes then I think you’re getting the gist of what is being said. The ending paragraphs have left a footprint in my mind and I can’t appreciate the author of this article enough. I urge you to read them, even if you disagree or have other opinions. Shameless self promotion on Zemanta’s part, another way to get users to use their tools?

I think not, from the looks of it these guys care about the web deeply and that’s something I admire and respect…

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/***Oh, had a good laugh whilst reading this:***/
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• Twitter is an orgy of bots spamming bots.
• The average Facebooker shares more baby pictures than party pictures.
• Google+ is a wasteland of geeks bragging about Circle configurations.

Spot on….