Well, other people linked to it ...
As should be expected, O'Reilly mentions Google's PageRank when dealing with
"harnessing collective intelligence". Without waxing overly poetic,
a good case can be made that the concept of PageRank created a paradigm shift.
Before PageRank the relevance of our search results were based on where a particular
search term was found in a document. With PageRank the degree to which others
thought a particular document was useful or worthwhile became a major factor in
our results. To no small extent, all of the social bookmarking tools that have
sprung up in the last few years are derived from that basic, but perhaps unexpected,
orientation.
But is what interests or attracts
other people necessarily what interests me? When I have checked the tags for
hypertext or associative hypertext in del.icio.us,
I've found that other people have either found items that I've been familiar with
since well before social bookmarking, or that they apparently aren't using those
terms to tag the type of items that I'm interested in. But perhaps I'm purposefully
being argumentative. After all, were I to find that people had tagged items that
did attract me (yet were items I wasn't yet familiar with) I'd probably complain
that social bookmarking, like PageRank before it, seems most designed to permit
us to feel good about talking to ourselves, to patting ourselves on the back that
we've found the right items.
Though to my mind PageRank is fundamentally
flawed because, and I'm writing here from experience, what other people find useful
is often not what I was looking for, there's certainly something to be said for
the marketplace of ideas that it epitomizes. Getting suggestions
that I can chose to ignore is, after all, generally better than not getting any
suggestions at all. PageRank assumes that the web is a meritocracy, and that with
enough effort any poor kid can rise to the top. In this light, a recent Clive
Thompson article suggests that this is wishful thinking.
Go to: How
to tell 1.0 from 2.0, or
Go to: It's
just too Oh!