Blogging Whuffie
Jon Husband points to a wonderful, hope-filled post from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, titled: "Blogging is great".
In it, Sir Tim succinctly and elegantly describes the nature of reputation on the platform he invented:
"The way quality works on the web is through links. It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice."
Perfect. It's like Cory Doctorow's idea of whuffie in Web action.
Not that Sir Tim's comment is a startling revelation for anyone familiar with the workings of the blogosphere, pagerank, Googlejuice, etc. But it's a nice example of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
In it, Sir Tim succinctly and elegantly describes the nature of reputation on the platform he invented:
"The way quality works on the web is through links. It works because reputable writers make links to things they consider reputable sources. So readers, when they find something distasteful or unreliable, don't just hit the back button once, they hit it twice."
Perfect. It's like Cory Doctorow's idea of whuffie in Web action.
Not that Sir Tim's comment is a startling revelation for anyone familiar with the workings of the blogosphere, pagerank, Googlejuice, etc. But it's a nice example of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed."
