| H.L. Mencken once said: "Conscience: The inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking." #112 What's About.com About? |
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A reader called my attention to a rather interesting item the other day, and I thought
60-Second Windows might be a good place to talk about it. Perhaps we can also reflect
on what the web is all about. The reader wrote: "I'm a regular reader of DT&G, and I enjoy your &FOTOgraphic department very much. I wanted to find more resources for photography so I used the search page in About.com... I was stunned with the results." |
 We Decided to look for ourselves...The reader went on describing what they found from that search, but we decided to look for ourselves. ... Now in the realm of the web, the word "portal" has recently become a very hot buzzword. Everyone wants to be a portal and get as many people as possible to set that page as their home page, or default browser page. Obviously they want to sell as many click-throughs as they can to the drooling wolves scratching at the doors of eCommerce. ... So it's true with the site that used to be called miningco.com. They recently changed their name (with great fanfare) to "About.com." to more widely position themselves as a portal. The propaganda reads like the best thing since sliced bread, where you can find out all about anything you want to know about. Or so you thought. ... We discovered for ourselves that About.com can also be about some things that you might NOT want to know about -- or worse yet, have your teenage daughter or son find out about. ... Why would an innocent search for the word "photography" turn up links about soft pornography rather than photography? No, we didn't spell it wrong.  ... The headline reads:
"Amateur Photography Home Page" -- okay, sounds like photography, yet the
selections of hits we get are: Gay Erotica! A cornucopia of copulation"
. . . "Straight Women's Erotica" and "Amateur Erotica" all promising
to dish up some rather lascivious content. "Helpings of choice manflesh to satisfy..."
is not necessarily what one might expect from a search about photography. The other
two links are for ZINES and Graphics Software. Surprisingly enough in the selection
of links presented, the word photography doesn't actually appear at all. Not once.
... Have we discovered that About.com isn't really about learning about what we're interested in? Or do you suppose that search engines have become so sophisticated they return not what WE want, but what will generate the most number of click-throughs? Or could this have been just a random quirk of fate. Who knows? ... I'll close with this idea for you to think about: What if you lined up 100 people -- at random -- from your favorite local shopping mall and asked them all to provide the first three or four things THEY think about when you say the key-word "Photography." What do you think they'll say? Got Comments? Fred "History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken." James Joyce |
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