Information authority and ranking

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 07 August 2005 10:32AM CST

Section: Publishing

We don’t need another top-100 list based on link rank, writes Mary Hodder in her Napsterization weblog. Instead, we need a metric for identity, affiliation, community, or influence. Instead of measuring the number of links or connections, we should be measuring the “depth and impact of those connections… and… engagement over time.“

Counting links, Hodder writes, is like counting magazine subscriptions to sell ads; an artifact of the analog mediasphere:

“Link counts alone are an analog media model, but online media is dynamic, and what is digital often has the possibility of getting much closer to finding smaller, more granular, and more interesting ways of perceiving things, that are much more interesting, and orthogonal to legacy media models counting eyeballs.“

Google’s pagerank algorithm, after all, while not secret is opaque because the ordering of the search results is secret, supposedly as a defense against spam and gaming the search engine. But a transparent metric would allow the micropublishers to help police the system. “Transparency as it exists in open source software, and as it should exist here, is the opposite of security by obscurity.“

Hodder says, rightly, that the metric for assessing weight in the blogosphere should be open, not closed. “Bloggers should have input about the importance of one social gesture over another,“ she writes. “One metric over another, and know what it is that is included because it will be used to describe them.“

Kevin Burton has published an excellent response to Hodder that really advances the discussion. Burton has been working in this area since its inception (what, five years ago?) and has clearly been thinking about these issues. His main point seems to be that transparency in a blogosphere ranking and reputation system is problematic because of technological complexities and intellectual property barriers.

A lot of money and effort is starting to percolate around the issue of quantifying influence in the blogosphere. Like it or not this is probably the single biggest issue for the future of micropublishing just now. Collectively we have to get this worked out for ourselves or there will be more external ranking systems forced upon us.

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