Are You REALLY Atrios?

Today's Yi-Tan conference call discussed an emerging theme amongst the blogophilic.  The base problem, as opined more technically by Mary Hodder, is:

How can we properly guide viewers to relevant blog content and community?

The nutshell problem is this:  Most search engines (Google, Technorati, etc.) look for links-in and links-out as a primary indicator of the social worth of a web page or blog post.  Anyone who has delved into the muck of the web for something specific knows that regardless of the impressiveness of current systems - you often find primarily e-commerce sites.

Danah Boyd (earlier post) wrote about gender issues in linking and link strength.  In essence, that men tend to link a whole lot more and a whole lot less selectively than women.  This ends up causing an imbalance in the relative strength of links WRT issues of importance to women and other factors.

So the issue here is how do we invent metrics to judge the relative social worth of one blog post over another.  The analysis needs to take into account the fact that gamers of this sytem are flooding the internet with content-free blog posts and web pages that contain key words and copious links.  These sites are primarily aimed to get eyeballs to make money for the people putting up these sites.  They are web spammers.  Web spammers are very good at gaming rankings like these and defeating their purpose.

Community is measured differently by different people.  Some measure it by the amount of participation in discussions. Some measure it by linking.  Some measure it by blogrolling.  But all these are, at best, indirect measures.

Direct measures may be no better.  If our solution is merely to tag links by their relative importance, those tags are easy to spot and easy to fabricate for web spammers. 

Ultimately, the issue at the moment is that there is no personal identification code for someone on the web.  There is no unique identifier.  Therefore, we have no content fingerprint with which to weed out serious content from spam.  We have no way of creating real reputation management.

Nancy White's quest for the ultimate community indicators is an element running along side this activity.  The ultimate answer to both question probably lies at their intersection somewhere in the future.  When we can measure via indirect means the strength of an emerging or emerged community then perhaps we can evaluate the relative worth of its members' contributions.

In the meantime, I will direct you again at Mary's post which provides a weighting of many different metrics which is either skimming off the existing metric soup or it may be a good Wisdom of Crowds approach.   It might be harder to game, but it may also be harder to obtain a good ranking because there are so many indicators to satisfy.

Posts by other bloggers on this topic can be found here.