Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Groups with a common interest have an extremely difficult
time coordinating their behavior. Even if coordinated
behavior would reap a significant common benefit.

For example there are numerous tragic stories of neighboring towns
standing by while fires distroyed a village or city because previously
their fire departments failed to coordinate the size of their hose fittings.

Coordinating behavior for common gain is particularly difficult in
competitive environments, like the marketplace. One thing that will
drive the players in a market to pay the coordinating cost is a common
threat to their survival. A common foe.

Here’s a facinating example. The hyper-competitive Whitehouse reporters
banded together against

their common foe, the president’s press secretary.

That kind of event sometimes is the precursor of standard setting.

Blogs are another system where we see power-law distributions. If we treat each blog as a node in a directed graph then the inter-blog linking can be used to rank each blog. A nieve observer might assume the best blogs have the most incomming links; confusing links with quality. A leading blog is more likely to garner additional links as the set of blogs increases. This is a beautiful example of “The rich get richer”. A world where the assumption that quality=links=wealth drives a positive feedback loop.

Consider a simple model. At any given instant in time a blog can collect a new link for one of two reasons - Quality or Findablity. A) Quality: It’s a really marvalous blog that people want to read. B) Findablity: It is a blog with lots of links so vast crowds of people find and randomly some link to it. If a million people find your lousy blog you’ll garner a lot of links. If a handful of people find your marvalous blog only a handful can link to it.

The challenge for the blogging community is to architect things to that people have an easier time finding the blogs that they personally find to be great. For example the authors of news aggregators should be aware that when they bundle in highly ranked blogs they are accelerating this rich get richer effect.

This is really the heart of the RSS design problem!

What other stuff could we do?

Could we build more rankings, for example rankings that are more topical. For example it it really useless that when browsing one of those blog ecology graphs I keep ending up at the same handful of blogs. Power-law distributed graphs have that kind of “black-hole effect”. All the tools need to compensate for that! What would it mean to create some kind of graduated income tax for blog linking?

The folks playing with graphs of the blog community ecology need to get some attributed quality rating scheme going. If I link to 10 other blogs I should be empowered to broadcast what I know. For example I know this link goes to a guy that’s funny, and that one to a site that’s reputable, and this one to a leading proffesional of kind foo.

Maybe news aggregatoring tool vendors provide schemes that measure the “use value” of a the blog on the other end of a link. How often did the link get followed? It could then publish that - for what it’s worth as one ranking attribute of the link.

Then there are freshness issues. I use NetNewsWire for an aggregator. I have about 40 RSS feeds in there. Some are pretty solid, but alot come and go as I try out various blogs, see if they can hold my interest. I wish my aggregator helped me do that.

Google’s solution to the librarian’s problem - findablity - stands on the presumption that links create a valid proxy for quality. It works delightfully when the population manufacturing links validates that hope.

Google is great in all kinds of esoteric domains where thousands of enthusists and domain experts are laboring way stitching together the web.

It seems to fall down when the domains become less esoteric. For example it’s useless when commerce is has created a fog of links that effecively jam the algorithum - e.g. try “I feel lucky” for cheap long distance service. Conversly it breaks down when the topic gets sufficently esoteric that there too few people working on it to create enough links that google can see ‘em - e.g. try “I feel lucky” for economic displacement. Most of history is in this “under linked” catagory; for example I’m a fan of the story telling school of economics from the 50s and 60s but almost none of that is on the web.

Which brings us to the question at hand; google is moving into news! (See Google News). Will the optomistic approximation links=quality work there? I think it’s going to be hard. The stuff is all fresh - so it won’t have gotten a lot of linking by proffesionals and enthusasts. There is a vast industry in place (i.e. PR and the news conglomerates) that labors furiously to jam the signal.

Of course optomisticly we can hope this raises the role that tools like blogs can play on the one hand and it might reanimate the job of the expert - the job the newspaper editor used to fufill.

I wonder if their ranking of articles is informed by their ranking of the newspaper that ran the article.

The model where quality=links is interestingly similar to so many other nieve models: quality=wealth, or quality=age, or quality=income, or quality=ancestors, quality=test_scores, quality=power, quality=certification. They are all a proxy. In a world of 10 billion attributes picking one or two certain to blind those that take them too seriously and lead to that great fear of conservatives and liberals alike unintended consequences.

“A metric ton of logic doesn’t offset that feeling of loss.”

Boy does that sum up what the economists call displacement; a kinder gentler word for refugee.

Of course there is also: “”The teeth of the sheep shall lay the useless plough up on the shelf.”

The 13th century prophesy that correctly foretold how landowners would displace the tenant farmers of Scotland with sheep.

Sometimes though you can find a few pounds of very insightful logic.

Brad deLong draws our attention to an article in Business Week about MSN and AOL trying to capture a chunk of the highspeed home ISP market. The article misses the point; this competition is about who will control the bandwidth market. Sure! It’s also about who will control the top of the power-law heap in the customer eye-ball market - but are these two really different. This is about big time innovation & disruption.
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