Protected: Do Blogs Matter?

Someone asked me this a while ago. I didn’t know what to say until I saw this on my logfile.

Someone had stumbled on my blog searching for ‘Sonia India‘ on Yahoo. The search results are dynamic, and so as expected, this result will change with time.

Yahoo search for 'Sonia India'

Yesterday, the third result that showed up on this search was my blog entry about why I oppose the Prime Ministerial aspirations of Sonia Gandhi.

Another popular blog shows up in this search too. Although their views don’t exactly line up with mine, this shows that blogs do matter because they allow an opinion to be voiced. One that might not get a chance in big media where editorial control and alliances with political heavyweights alongwith the selling of newspaper printspace often dilutes the story.

So now you can decide for yourself, whether blogs matter or not. :-)

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Comments (5)

  1. Niket wrote::

    Doesn’t prove that blogs matter. Just shows that valid markup and appropriate links provide higher ranks with search engines :-)

    Monday, May 17, 2004 at 8:17 am #
  2. Prashant Mullick wrote::

    Hahaha,

    Do Blogs Matter < — > Does anyone take notice of blogs

    And with valid markup and well formed links, if the opinions can be expressed and ‘found’ then the purpose is served!

    I stress on found!

    The real question is, do blogs really show up on search engine results, or is it Big media that hogs the limelight!

    The answer to that is laid out bare now. :-)

    Monday, May 17, 2004 at 11:25 am #
  3. Prashant Mullick wrote::

    It brings me to wonder,

    None of these sites I just checked use cruft-free urls:
    BBC, NYTimes, CBS, WAshington Post, GuardianUK, FoxNews, ABCNews

    None of these Indian sites have cruft-free urls either:
    NDTV, Indian Express, TOI, Mid-day, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Rediff

    One site I found that did use cruft free urls and is a big name in news was:
    CNN

    All it takes is a little bit of Rewrite engine using mod_rewrite if Apache is the server of choice… I’m sure its not too much of a big deal to do even on IIS or any other server system.

    Then why doesn’t big media use cruft-free urls?

    Interesting huh?

    Monday, May 17, 2004 at 7:54 pm #
  4. Niket wrote::

    An addition to already growing blog entries on “the cost of pagerank.” Very well articulated by Doug Bowman.
    http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/05/28/cost.html

    Monday, May 31, 2004 at 6:07 pm #
  5. Prashant Mullick wrote::

    Actually Aditya Bedekar also brought out a similar sentiment in this blog post.

    http://navierstokes.blogspot.com/2004/05/tp-tops-list.html

    Yahoo sends his blog to the top of the list for a search for Transport Phenomena. :-)
    What I do find surprising is how high blog posts get ranked in search results for various eclectic keywords. Doug Bowman does touch upon that too in the post mentioned above.

    Monday, May 31, 2004 at 11:53 pm #