We don’t need another top-100 list based on link rank, writes Mary Hodder in her Napsterization weblog. Instead, we need a metric for identity, affiliation, community, or influence. Instead of measuring the number of links or connections, we should be measuring the “depth and impact of those connections… and… engagement over time.”
Counting links, Hodder writes, is like counting magazine subscriptions to sell ads; an artifact of the analog mediasphere:
“Link counts alone are an analog media model, but online media is dynamic, and what is digital often has the possibility of getting much closer to finding smaller, more granular, and more interesting ways of perceiving things, that are much more interesting, and orthogonal to legacy media models counting eyeballs.”
Google’s pagerank algorithm, after all, while not secret is opaque because the ordering of the search results is secret, supposedly as a defense against spam and gaming the search engine. But a transparent metric would allow the micropublishers to help police the system. “Transparency as it exists in open source software, and as it should exist here, is the opposite of security by obscurity.”
