Why Skeptical Blogging?
I noted in Skeptical Blogging 101 that skeptical people can help spread critical thinking and promote the debunking of woo simply by having their own blog.
And while just one skeptical person with a blog isn’t going to make a big difference, thousands of skeptical people with blogs will make an enormous difference.
Why is this true? Aside from the obvious “lots of small influences can exceed a few big influences”, I can sum it up in one word: Pagerank.
Pagerank is how Google determines which sites it returns for search results. It’s a fairly complicated formula, but Google sums it up best:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
So when you link to a page, you’re voting for that page. When thousands of us link to pages, that’s thousands of votes.
A great example of this was the response to the (lie-filled) movie Expelled. At the time of its (limited) theatrical release, skeptics banded together and linked the word Expelled to the Expelled Exposed web site, just as I did in the previous sentence. With thousands of links of the word “Expelled” going there it quickly became the first result when googling for the movie. It seems to have recently moved down to third place.
This practice is known as a “Google Bomb“. The people who linked to Expelled Exposed helped ensure that those googling for the movie would hear the truth about the movie. As Google is the #1 online resource for finding information this is very important.
And you can help by making your own blog and helping out! Get out there and “vote”!