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.

has accounted for a major dip in productivity in our office. Unlike previous social network building apps like sixdegrees or ryse there is something about it which is incredibly compelling.

Is it:

• The ease of use of the well-considered IA and user-interface?
• The photos?
• The “privacy of the mall” feeling of a private public place that you feel confidence in?
• The fact it’s not dressed up in “personal-productivity” speak and is just obviouslly about reinforcing and discovering social ties, and, ahem… dating?

Or all of the above. Go and explore it, using the beta code: “coke”. I’d be very interested in anyone’s views/criticisms.

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