You must’ve read this many times around: the key issue of blogs is its capability to allow text producers (bloggers) and their readers to collaborate to broaden and improve the contents and articles published. This is accomplished thanks to the integration of tools such as comments and trackbacks. In a way, this is true. But sometimes we can’t help to think: to what extent is this speech no more than a legitimation of blogs as tools, when they’re still growing and many times facing a very unreliable reading from the communications media.

But at Endocitosis de Red (spanish only) an interesting discussion about commercial blogs is taking place. The key: to make a blog good, we need attentive and collaborative readers, but to make the most money out of it, we better get visitors from Google or other search engines. Why? Because “parachutists” visitors are the ones who click on Adsense’s advertisement boxes. Regular visitors don’t pay attention to the ads and don’t click on them.

Rather than considering it an opposition, we should face this as a delicate relation. On one side, without readers who help us, with their collaboration, to improve our blogs, we won’t have better contents. But in the case of blogs with advertisement spaces, without a decent Google ranking and many “parachutist visitors”, the income will be low. Is it possible to encompass neatly this relation? Won’t the focus on the need of income end up ruining good part of the blogs’ collaborative possibilites?

Other possible conversations are arising. Aren’t blogs depending too much on Google? Will we get anything good from obsessing about our Pagerank? Will we write for our readers or to accomplish being found by a search engine? This kind of open discussions are an interesting opportunity to see how critical can the blogosphere be with itself, even at the expense of being, sometimes, too self-referencial.