Links WERE dead: A gesture proof
Over the past year on the Gillmor Gang, Steve has contended that a lotta things are dead, among them, links.
I can’t really speak for Office, but I always took Steve to mean that the future of Office was death, and I also thought that’s where he was heading with links.
Nay.
I’ve come to realize that links aren’t going to be dead, but they have been, even before Steve started talking about them. He was just observing current phenomenons.
Let me prove it.
1. Everyone will probably agree that the blogosphere would be hard, if not impossible to use without SPAM filters.
2. There are two common methods of filtering out blogosphere SPAM (there are three, really but we all know that visual/manual filtering doesn’t scale well with our attention e.g. email)
The two methods are using data from the collective intelligence, and algorithmic detection and often a combination of both.
3. Using collective data and an algorithm to determine the value of something is analagous, if not actually what using gestures are all about.
Conclusion: Links in a distributed social network like the blogosphere are useless without a gesture filter. A link can be a useful tool. Links as a value exchange are useless.
So, all along, even the mighty Google has been using gestures to decide which links have value and which don’t. The game has been over for a while.
In a nutshell, links are useless without gestures, but gestures don’t need links.
One final note: If you are reading this, you have used implict or explicit gestures to come to the conclusion that either the link to this post had value, or that the RSS URL had value. Period.
One final final note: Technorati uses links, no? Yes, but they also filter out Splogs, so the links already have a certain gesture value. I bet you can imagine a more sophisticated blog ranking system that not only took into consideration links, but context and behavior to determine what was up.