Doc Searls

« Doc Searls is not a gatekeeper.
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Doc Searls, on the other hand, flies from conference to conference and writes about things that interest him.Google indexes his pages, and as a result of the link structure of the web and Google's PageRank algorithm, pages that he links to end up higher in the Google search results.Doc Searls isn't actively deciding who gets on the first page of Google.If Google changed their algorithm to use BrinRank, in which pages are sorted by length and links are ignored, then Doc Searls would do exactly the same thing, and entirely different pages would get the top results on Google.If Searls is the gatekeeper, rather than *Rank, what's going on?

The second commenter, Monsieur Lheureux, characterizes Doc Searls as having the ability to drown me out in the Google listings, making my post "effectively inaccessible."
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Doc SearlsSays:
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The second commenter, Monsieur Lheureux, characterizes Doc Searls as having the ability to drown me out in the Google listings, making my post "effectively inaccessible."
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Doc Searls is a gatekeeper functionally just like the letters editor for the Boston Globe is a gatekeeper, except to a smaller audience.He decides which people get mentioned and which posts get linked in his publication, in exactly the same way the Globe editor decides about letters.
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I agree with all your points about the power law distribution of readership and the influence that Doc Searls has over the attention of his large crowd of readers.
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If Doc Searls is a gatekeeper in the sense that we've been discussing, then I'd like to ask him to cut it out.The problem is that I can't find fault with his behavior, given the resources he has.

For me to find fault with Doc, there has to be an alternative that he's avoiding.How would we prefer that he behave?Link to worse sources, just because they're unpopular?If his blog were just "Here's another link to the front page of Boing Boing," then sure, branch out a little, Doc, but I assume he already makes a reasonable effort to write about stuff that other people aren't already writing about.Doc, if you're listening, can you verify this?

I agree with your later assertion about the "living wage."That's a great way of thinking of it.I think calling Doc Searls a gatekeeper is like comparing him to Walmart, when he's really more like a guy running a mom and pop convenience store- he doesn't have any more power to affect the inequities of the supply chain than the rest of us.
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I don't think that Doc Searls being a gatekeeper then means one should ask him to cut it out.It's simply a description, a fact, given that he has a significant audience.Now, not all gatekeepers are of the same magnitude, just like there are letters editors to the Boston Globe, to smaller papers, to community newsletters.Again, far more people heard me after he took notice of what I said.

There seems to be such an impulse to regard "Old Media" as somehow closed while "New Media" as a brave new world (I don't think I'm even parodying here, that is the tone of the rhetoric).But I keep pointing out, there's no effective difference from the standpoint of how the system functions in practice.

I don't think Doc himself is a *bad* gatekeeper - quite the opposite, I and other critics of blog evangelism have said he's one of the best A-listers and best people around (but even a very nice boss is still a boss).