In the world of blogs, artificial links are Cancer

In the world of blogging, there was a recent event that artificially increased the number of links to a number of blogs. It was the “2000 Bloggers” project, and it was added to long list of other things that bloggers do to try and get as many people as possible to link to their sites.

I’m new to this whole world of blogging, but apparently it can be elevating to your own status in the blog world to have a lot of connections to other sites. In fact, people can get pretty aggressive about it.

I can’t help but think of the similarities between artificial linking and, well…cancer.

As Michael Wesch’s video illustrates, the links that make up the web have a certain similarity to our own body and mind. And in my last post I pointed out that the connections throughout the internet are really similar to the connections in our own brains.

But it’s not just in our brains. Our bodies are created and defined by all of the relationships among all of the different parts- hormonal, structural, electrical, sub-atomic, etc.

This situation works well as long as the connections have meaning and the functions that result are helpful to the overall body.

A cancer grows when it starts manipulating the body’s resources for its own gain. Blood vessel growth and sugar intake are increased solely for the good of cancer.

Isn’t that kind of similar to this 2000 bloggers thing? And, I suppose, the other kinds of linkbaiting and buying of links that are referenced in these comments?

But before we get too worried about the health of the blogosphere, I think the response from the blogging community has been instructive.

Cancer arises in your own body every day. Millions of times per day, in fact. Your immune system simply finds it and kills it. End of story, until your overall health is depressed enough to let it grow. Or until a cancer comes along that is particularly aggressive.

It seems to me that the self-regulation of the internet (consider the success of Wikipedia) is working well, and it is another indication that what we are building on internet servers around the world is getting more and more alive by the minute.

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