On supporting science journalism
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“When you google yourself, who do you find?” That question was raised by Clive Thompson, speaking Tuesday at a science journalism symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Thompson is a science and technology writer and columnist at Wired. Back in 2002, if Thompson googled himself, the most popular sites that came up were for a British Lord Clive Thompson. The journalist Clive Thompson wanted his writings to come up first. So he started to blog. “I essentially wanted to hack Google. Google looks for, ya know, if you type in Clive Thompson, it finds every page that has Clive Thompson on it, but then it ranks them based on which pages have the most links pointing to them. Under that logic, the best way to dominate the top spot for you online is to have a site with zillions of things pointing to it. And the sites that tend to have zillions of thing pointing to them are blogs.” Useful info for any John Smiths hoping to be found with a Google search. “After about like two months of blogging, my blog was already on the front page for Clive Thompson. And about six or seven months later it was the number one slot. And now, I mean, I’ve just liquidated this guy.”
—Steve Mirsky, from the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships Future of Science Journalism Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts
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