About Laura van der Vlies
Laura van der Vlies is currently a New Media master student at the University of Amsterdam.
After finishing the New Media bachelor program and finishing the propedeuse year CMD at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, this is the year to finally really learn the inside of new media today.
This summer I participated in the Digital Methods Initiative. This really made me learn to use knowledge in a different way. With interests in the topic of journalism on the web and certain forms of censorship I hope to make valuable contributions to this blog.
Websitehttp://www.lauravdv.nl
After some weeks the spinplant is still alive. A search with the query “spinplant” in Google gives an overview of some nice and weird links. For example a mention on a Japanese site, linked to Secondlife. But the spinplant also appeared on the website ‘watvindenwijover’, a Dutch site where people can give their opinion about different things that happen online.
Michael’s article about making the spinplant more relevant is still favorite. Surprisingly Wikipedia is first to be found on the 34th result.
Nabble.com
New media signal
watvindenwijover
Zimbio
2collab
Feedster
Metaverse
Kaywa
Tagcentral
am so enjoying this sequel :)
I was surprised that the page http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinplant no longer appears in Google’s results. However, I checked and this is because Wikipedia adds a ‘noindex’ tag to pages that have been deleted or have not been created. While it is impossible to say with certainty, this probably also means Google’s cached version of the page has been deleted.
Thus it is only with slightly twisted logic that we can conclude that, alongside the previous maxim ‘what is not relevant cannot appear in Wikipedia’, there is another: ‘what does not appear in Wikipedia cannot be relevant’.
reminds me of a discussion regarding the shocklog entry in wikipedia (last year)… following michael, was sjoerd van der helm’s ma-thesis (about the shocklog phenomena) a complete waste of time (as there is no shocklog entry in wikipedia)?
by the way, are you sure ‘relevant’ is the right word? I mean, isn’t wikipedia flooded with trivia?
@Roman
Sorry, I was not being very explicit. My point was that by Google’s standards, this URL (http://nl.wikipedia.org/Spinplant) is relevant because of the great number of links to it. However, because of the ‘noindex’ tag it isn’t in Google’s search returns.
So in other words, “what is not in Wikipedia” (the hidden spinplant page) “cannot be relevant” (does not appear in Google hits). This is simply a reversal of the problem we started with, both in the case of the shocklog and the spinplant (i.e. what does not appear relevant in Google cannot be in Wikipedia).
Luckily, this play on words still only concerns a fictional plant and a blog genre!
Hope this clears things up, I definitely do not mean that Wikipedia should be used to gauge relevance – that’s what Google does :)
@Roman: About the trivia, I do know Wikipedia is trying to cut the trivia lists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trivia_sections
thanks michael..
anyway, twan, isn’t everything besides food, shelter and having unsafe intercourse at least once trivial?
oke, I’ll quit now with the cynical remarks