"WWGD?"

A concept from What Would Google Do that stuck out to me was from the section Everybody Needs Google Juice in the chapter New Publicness. Jarvis mentions how websites can become enemies of Google by creating spam blogs to try to game the system. These “splogs”, as he calls them, are filled with automatically generated links to a single website, skewing Google’s algorithms and making that website seem more popular than it actually is.

This idea of splogs made me remember something that happened to one of my favorite websites a few years ago. In my formative high school years I, like many other sheltered Caucasian teenagers, took an interest in hip-hop music (Wu-Tang Forever!). And being as shielded as I was, many of the slang terms abundant in rap songs were completely foreign to me. Thankfully, there was website seemingly tailored made for people of my disposition called RapGenius.com. It’s a lyrics website that offers users the ability to annotate sections of songs in order to define meaning or give interpretations. It’s great for people with a turbulent understanding of Ebonics. All was well, until December 2013, when I found that the website had disappeared from Google’s results page. Turns out, the creators of Rap Genius were doing exactly what Jeff Jarvis described, creating fake blog links to trick Google into moving the site further up the results page. Eventually the creators apologized and the website was added back to the search results, more popular than ever. Good thing too, now I don’t have to go to Urban Dictionary to find out what the word “steez” means.

The first statement Jeff Jarvis replies to about the internet is “There is junk on the Internet”. Jarvis responds by saying that while he agrees that there is a lot of junk, it’s no different than the poor quality entertainment on bookshelves or television. He says that the internet shouldn’t be looked at as a well-produced T.V. show, but instead as a messy reflection of life. I agree with most of what he says here, but with a slight caveat. That being, I believe that even the junk is getting better. When I think back to what sort of content went viral over a decade ago, there’s a noticeable downgrade in quality from what the internet thinks is meme-worthy today. Back then, all we needed was a fat guy lip-syncing to Eurodance music in front of a webcam. Now, we need a fully produced music video by a Korean pop-star dancing like he’s riding a horse. Both are equally insane, but at least the production values are higher.