Tanya Pixelcharmer has a great linkful post about power-laws, the web, citation-analysis and, ascending-meme-of-the month: “the trouble with Google”:
“So, ultimately the thing that makes Google so great, is also it’s major flaw — weighting pages in favor of highly trafficked sites, or weighting in favor of sites that are pointed to by highly trafficked sites. Therefore a search on the word �Dao� will give you the article “The Dao of Web Design” at A List Apart before those that discuss it�s original meaning. So, Google suffers from the power law distribution that links obey when looked at over the entire web.”
Blogs maybe rendering Google bankrupt, but perhaps the problem is not with Google and pagerank, but with who blogs at the moment. Can’t find that much on a blogger demographic or blogging demographic other than pollyanna-ish ‘everyone’s a blogger’ puff-pieces in old media. My guess is that Chris Gulker’s piece in The Independent is rather closer to the sub-demographic, who instead of deadjournalling about Slipknot are gaming Google with their linkmachines.
“‘We’ are nerds, geeks, dweebs, technorati and, in this case, bloggers, a group of about 50, mostly male, mostly middle-aged and largely under-employed or unemployed inhabitants of Silicon Valley”
Nothing wrong with this of course… and I love reading that stuff, but while the googlebot is learning from such a limited set of time-rich, high-link-worth individuals, then you’re going to run into the problems Tanya describes. I also don’t think it’s that much of a showstopper of a problem. In the blogging, tech and digital design community we may tend to ask more tech, design or abstract questions which are not answered outside of the blogosphere, and therefore there is little surprise that the mirror of pagerank is held up against us. “Real-world” queries are still answered happily and with heterogeneity by Google. For example, this morning a friend asked me if there were puffins on Skomer Island and google helped me answer with one click (the answer is “yes”)
I’m not suggesting we immediately drop B52-fulls of free simputers all over the world in order to make the GoogleTruth more inclusive, but what about channelling some Vannevar Bush, and making like the Memex. I’m sure we all have this committed to memory by now:
” Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
And of course his notion of many memex linked by ‘trails’:
“There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”
As I perhaps naively see it [and if there was one post destined to get me flames it might be this one], there is a current skew of those who are creating their own Memex and, particularly those who are blazing trails between them. I’ve talked before about lowering barriers to entry being one of the most important factors for me in creating social software – and re-reading Bush’s 1945 tubthumper makes me think of one key area that might get us a high blogbang-for-buck.
What about a flavour of blog creation software aimed at academics, professors, researchers – specialised templates, tailored language and interface, easy-to-intergrate with college intranets, easier to publish to the web from within an internal net, tied to citation management software, directories and search tools.
Alongside this, pioneer blogging-academics to come up with a best-practice approach for those wanting to start out, a creative-commons style license for academic bloggers which builds an ‘everyone-wins’ academic-commons and also an approach for colleges to map blogging to traditional measures of academic success such as publishing and citation.
If we could find ways for the collected, collegiate building and crucially linking of the global academic memex to the quality of the blogosphere, where the link-loam gets deeper by the day, then pretty soon if you searched for Dao you’d get something by the chair of comparative religion and philosophy rather than a webdesigner in an aeron chair.
Petafloptimism 
It’s ironic, don’t you think, that the blogging tool for academics that you’re describing is what Berners-Lee thought he’d originally created . . . ?
The problems with blogging are problems that are shared in Vannevar Bush’s original text. Bush *hated* librarians, and his famous text is a pretty well argued case against leaving the distribution of knowledge in their hands. (It’s also a pretty well argued case for the Government to continue funding all the projects he’d started, like DARPA, now that WWII was over and they weren’t needed to make weapons anymore, but that’s another story.)
Once you remove the structures that create meaning, then you’re left swimming in the sea of relativity. The blogging worlds’ affect on Google is a perfect example of what happens when Bush’s vision of trailblazers is fully realised in an interconnected network – the loudest, or most prolific, voices get heard above everyone else, and the skewed view of the word starts to become useless to everyone else.
The problem here is not technological, it’s social. And there’s no easy way to fix it, other than by re-inserting a structure over the top that aims to redress the ‘balance’ – which is what you’re suggesting with the blogging tool for academics.
But, of course, by doing this you’re replacing power laws with a power structure, and therefore removing the democratic nature of the social software system you’re trying to build.
So we’re back to square one. Perhaps we should stop trying to democratise the software, and realise that actually social problems can’t be solved with technology. Any system we build will be infused with, and subject to, the power laws, power structures, and power games that we map over from our social world. Google, perhaps, should rank less on frequency and links and rank sites based on the ‘respect’ the source has.
Perhaps we need to add something to the link, something that indicates more than a massively interconnected popularity contest, something that scores the link on a peer-reviewed system of relevance and veracity, something like Slashdots’ scoring system mapped across every link.
Or perhaps we should all go back and read our Foucault, remember what it was like when it was the early Nineties and we were discovering Critical Theory and the Internet at the same time and for the first time, and re-think it all again.
Google rewards ubiquity over veracity, Matt: I said it at TakeItOutside.
Now, if we could vector the link, give it a force as well as a direction, and a force that isn’t simply amplitude. Then you have a curious mechanics.
(You could have ” down to , like h1-h6. But that trusts people not to shout, which isn’t going to happen. But vectors, yes. And now I must sleep.
Oh, but there is Google Glossary on the labs.google.com site. And it’s overlooked by most people. But I like the basic premise, which is ‘dig out everything that looks like a definition, and throw in a link to Dictionary.com and M-W.com for good measure’. Hook that up to some high-powered juju, integrate it with Big Google, and then we’re getting somewhere.
Or, use the Google Answers model to verify Google Glossary, and then hook it into Big Google.
Can someone give me a job, please?
The power of linking can be a negative one, depending on how finely it is measured (thought you might like that analogy).
But once ways are created to filter the power (maybe to a group who you respect, admire, belong to, etc. – which could include academics of course – but which could span traditional boundaries – class, title, qualifications – and be more based around experience, ability, reliability, trust, fellowship, etc.) it could be managed more usefuly.
I am worried that the web may simply continue the traditional hierarchy of academics – the web is one thing that could help to get away from this – allowing a multitude of allegiances and groupings to form. You could then choose to focus on things people you respected/liked or conversely concentrate on what those you disagreed with rated highly.
Notions like joined up rankings and collaborative filtering spring to mind.
Isn’t what blogging creates some sort of communal aggregator – kinda like FOAF but with meaning or associations built in?
The academics I’ve talked to about blogging, even those who are our age, seem very suspicious. “You mean share my research and ideas? Often? To whoever wants to read them? Why in the world would I do that? I want to publish original stuff in journals.”
A built-in liscense might help out a lot here, if the benefits can be clearly explained.