Call it what you want, it [the Internet] is all about ratings now. We can argue that what makes a blog important is the nature of the content, but who are we kidding? We hide what we really mean by calling it "page views," "impressions," "unique visitors," "click-throughs," "time spent on site," but it is all the same. From now on, I'm just going to lump it all together and call it ratings. If you don't think ev Call it what you want, it [the Internet] is all about ratings now. We can argue that what makes a blog important is the nature of the content, but who are we kidding?We hide what we really mean by calling it “page views,” “impressions,” “unique visitors,” “click-throughs,” “time spent on site,” but it is all the same.From now on, I’m just going to lump it all together and call it ratings. If you don’t think everyone on the Web, including me, is obsessed with getting good ratings, take a look at this Reality Check headline which I wrote last week — “Eyewitness to H-1B scammers.” I laugh, but it sounds more like a lead-in to the local 10 o’clock news than a story on a high-tech site geared to CTOs and CIOs.One antidote, on broadcast television, to the mindset that wants to figure out how many murders you can mention in thirty seconds before you cut to commercial, is public television. Public television to a lesser degree than commercial TV worries less about ratings. On public TV you can see a documentary on sheep shearing in the Hebrides. That may not be your cup of tea, but the world doesn’t all have to be about appealing to the majority. Yes, there are individuals with great sites, great blogs, great content. But there is also something to be said for news organizations like CNN and MSNBC that can post reporters around the world and deliver information that an individual sitting behind his or her computer could never do.Part of the problem facing all content providers — television and Internet alike — is that the argument coming from the marketing side of the office cubicle for appealing to the mass market has a certain logic. It goes something like this. Why post a story to the Web that very few people will ever read? If you argue that it is important that this information be disseminated, the somewhat circular reasoning comes back with the argument, which has some validity, if no one reads the story, it doesn’t matter if it is important. Why waste your time doing the serious story that gets low “ratings”?We can look to television to see what happens when you take this argument to its “logical” conclusion: Dexter, a Showtime-turned-CBS show whose hero is a serial killer who likes to torture people because they deserve it. Cable was supposed to be one response to inane network shows but ratings are affecting their content as well. How many times can you watch American Pie or even Sixth Sense? The only hope is some of the programs produced by the niche channels, such as the History Channel and Discovery that have h igh production values and offer education along with entertainment. Okay, I confess to enjoying MythBusters, MonsterQuest, and UFO Hunters,, but aren’t they also an indication of ratings obsession eroding content? How this unbridled quest for ratings will shape what information the online content providers–including InfoWorld, Cnet, eWeek, CNN, MSNBC, Google, the New York Times–give us is yet to be determined. Remember, while a Web site has unlimited space to deliver both serious and trivial content there is a limit to the resources the provider can devote to creating the content. How then do editors refute the logic of marketers?For those of us in high tech, maybe the answer to that kind of “logic” is this. How can we be taken seriously on major issues, not if but when they occur, if all the readers have been seeing on the aforementioned Web sites are stories about the iPhone?My hope is that this is still very new to all of us on the Internet. And that over time it will sort itself out. Technology Industry