Teenagers...Yikes!

For last night's class, we read the How Teenagers Hijacked the Internet article. Yikes. A lotta them.

Yikes #1:
"Wikipedia gets 54% of its traffic from Google search results. The majority of Wikipedia visitors then proceed to MySpace or Blogspot, both of which use Google as their search service."
[Kinda vicious cycle, no? Kinda bordering on some Big Brother action, right?]

The "intimate relationship" between these entities has affected the true, or organic, nature of their symbiosis. Even though Google's Big Daddy program "still calculates the popularity of Websites by counting incoming links," the article suggests that the results are still manipulated. Due to this behind-the-scenes backscratching, the value or popularity of a website may not actually have organically grown. We like to think that sites are popular because they have caught on, that they have an audience, that their cleverness in content and design has won them the popularity they deserve. But in truth, that doesn't really matter. Which takes us to...

Yikes #2:
"Wikipedia, the 'encyclopedia' whose 'editors' are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults is touted by Google as an authoritative source of information." [You thought that was enough? No, the Yikes grows into the following YIKES] "In search results, it is placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on." YIKES. After our discussions of the value of Wikipedia, doesn't that statement undermine Google's credibility?