Funny, because that is the exact opposite of how the Internet developed: it was designed and built with government money by graduate students working for pennies who didn’t try to lock up the “intellictual property” for themselves (the way biology researchers do today). It was then given away for free at a time when this was thought to be the appropriate course of action for university research, particularly that funded by the public.

Then the Internet grew to popularity largely on the back of tools developed by the GNU project under the General Public License (GPL) and CERN (another public entity with a “gift culture”).

Finally a very large portion of the Internet is today supported by Linux-based systems, Linux™ being another tool built under the umbrella of that pesky ole GPL.

How does that history fit in with the economists’ desire to monitize everything?

Cranky

The conceptual leap made by Google was to recognize, in the structure of the Web link (a marriage of resource-pointing behavior with keywordish description), an opportunity to analyze, across the information space, the existing association of resources with intelligence about them. That’s an analysis of relevance: simplistically, the more pages associate a given resource with a given bit of description, the likelier it is that the resource is relevant to the bit of description.

To treat links as bloggers do, as an attentional currency—ideally, a measure of interestingness—follows a different conceptual model from Google’s, though, even if both can be made subject to similar attacks meant to distort the information space. “Reciprocity” is the chief difference: the link, in the Google model, isn’t reciprocal; it ends at the pointed-to resource. Where links are treated as currency, though, reciprocity—rather than pointing-to—is the fundamental gesture. “Interestingness” may or may not be an artifact of the link-exchange, but it’s only an artifact, not part of the structure of the exchange.

In other words, your notion that “the relationship between links and interestingness” might be in danger of breaking isn’t persuasive to me, because I think the relationship was always-already broken as soon as links became currency. And while the blogosphere does, indeed, reliably produce interestingness as an artifact of link exchange, link exchange is a wildly unreliable measure of interestingness within the blog space. In fact, the power-law effect in social networks pretty much guarantees that, as it expands, the link structure of the blogosphere will become less and less reliable as an index of good/interesting: necessarily, more and more such stuff is going to languish in the tail of the distribution. Flogrollers, in that sense, are already (as it were) behind the curve: they can’t distort the picture more than the network effect already has, and will continue to.

That’s a really quite interesting argument that I’ll have to think about (although I do acknowledge reciprocity as a distorting influence in link cartels etc). One important caveat though – Dan Drezner and I have done research which suggests that links among political bloggers have a lognormal distribution rather than a power law. The implication of this is that we don’t have a simple rich get richer model of network growth – it is possible for quality new blogs to break in.

Here’s the nut of it; Consider the style:

“I found this interesting” (Insert link, insert snarky comment, fade to tagline)

Is this content, aggregation, or both?

To my mind this is content provision, but that’s me.

Then there are special-interest blogs where the total community’s collective judgement is unlikely to swing Google or Technorati one way or another, but provides immediate value in creating shared knowledge among people with arcane interests that aren’t being served locally.

It seems that a theory of blog economy would have to extend beyond the newsblogs and poliblogs and debateblogs to encompass, oh, I don’t know, hummel figurine blogs and Swedish sexploitation film blogs and drawing-bible-stories-on-grains-of-rice blogs and . . . .

Well, maybe a complex rich get richer model of network growth? That is, the power law curve is only a rough approximation. Its best application is in debunking the blog-triumphalism of some evangelists (along with the concomitant let-them-eat-cake cruelty, that if you’re poor, I mean unread, it must be because you’re shiftless and lazy, since there is such abundant opportunity in blogotopia …). But it’s certainly not the last word. There’s “ecological shifts” which provide lottery-like opportunities for break-outs from the bottom – for example, an Iraqi who favors the US occupation may suddenly find himself with a very large audience. And established pundits can bring much of their audience with them when starting a blog. Political blogs are arguably experiencing a kind of gold-rush right now.

Links are a measure of popularity, which sometimes may be correlated with “interestingness.” This may or may not say anything about content, and indeed sites with many links are found all over the political/social spectrum.

Google and other search engines are getting better at delivering what a person is actually looking for, provided that person can choose a few appropriate words, but they do not evaluate content for whether it makes sense or other details.

Bloggers search the internet in selective ways and link to what is within their definition of “interestingness.” If you find a blog you like, you can rely on that blog to deliver some of what you’re looking for on the Web. If others haven’t found the blog yet or don’t share your viewpoint, then the blog won’t have their links.

Bloggers also provide content, frequently in a particular niche. I like to write on scientific topics that are mangled by the media, for example, or new scientific findings that could be of general interest but probably won’t be picked up by the media, along with nuclear nonproliferation. This kind of material may or may not contain links. I link to reference material, or recent, fairly obscure, sources rather than other blogs in posts of this kind.

Blogs can be both content providers and “interestingness” aggregators at a level above the search engines. Links have little to do with this. And Gresham’s law really does work.

One, banish the blogroll from the front page of a blog (set it up on bloglines instead). There’s a subtle difference between what I read and what my readers should read. It doesn’t take an economist to point out that scarcity has a value. The less links you have, the better. It was nice to hear Jay Rosen concede this point at webcred conference when I pressed his thinking on it. (BTW, Henry, I brought your paper up on-screen at the conference when countering Winer’s claim that “the media doesn’t read blogs.”)

Second, qualify your links, not based on topic, but what you think of them. As any blogger would say, transparency is the best policy (at least, for other people.)

And third, wouldn’t it be a gas if bloglines started releasing data about how frequently people scan the blogs—and compare them to their own qualifications? I wrote this up in a little more depth a couple of months back—and that was before Seth coined the phrase “love for the linklorn.”

I’m not too worried about the power law—sorry, logarithmic law—I think we’re still under a bit of a shakeout… especially when people have to upgrade from MovableType to the next generation of social software.

No technical solution is possible using the approach Google and other IR systems have taken to date. None: none now, none later, and I’m pretty sure none ever. There is no algorithm capable of making the required distinction using exclusively information about the structure of the web – at least so long as the people who produce web materials are aware, even partially, of the mechanisms used by IR services. I can’t prove this rigorously, but I suspect that it could be proven rigorously as a variation of the Halting Problem proof. All Google can do is run the Red Queen’s Race: try to devise new filtering mechanisms faster than the spammers can reverse engineer them.

The only alternative is to use mechanisms which have access to information other than the structure of ‘Net information. There are a number of those, and research continues, but to date there has been no satisfactory success. The best results to date have all involved retreating from process automation and using some quantity of human labour to maintain database quality. This is too expensive to be satisfactory, and where it is being tried, it is not organised on a large enough scale to help.

I suspect the nature of the problem precludes a firm with the kind of technical orientation and business model of Google from resolving the challenge of link spam and link spuriousness in a comprehensive way. I’m not sure where to look for a solution. My own field touches on some of these areas, and if I was a gambling man, I’d look at research into automated question answering for some answers. But I don’t think waiting for the free market to create a technical solution is really going to work any better here than it has for automatic translation or other problems that highlight the difficulty of modelling the behaviour of agents capable of modelling their modellers.

I just want to say, what possessed the writer of that link to illustrate his power-law graphs using linear-linear scales?