(2005-08-09) Boyd Link Biases

Danah Boyd on the "biases of links" (implicit assumptions in actually treating an A-List as meaningful). I make various comments/suggestions.

Mary Hodder is looking for alternative metrics. Part of what we want is a rich user generated Ontology resulting in topic groups that is constantly adjusting to find what's delightful, useful, interesting across blogs. And a more complex metric for understanding those topic groups and individual users as they blog memes and interact with each other, with some context around those bloggers, would help quite a bit. (Kevin Marks points out that Technorati's Tagsonomy searching helps assemble this. Though they need to deal with clusters and intersections before things really get interesting.)

• she also notes that it makes sense not to care about the A-List, except that PR hacks are increasing the concentration of attention in their "analysis". But you're never going to win that game with more-subtle measures. These guys are just playing the Economics Of Scarcity game. Jack Krupansky makes the meta-point that never seems to get addressed by this crowd: Do we really have a handle on what problem we're trying to solve? Show me a robust Problem Statement/Problem Definition, and only when there is some consensus about what the problem is (and how people with actually use the metric(s)) does it make sense to consider solutions. See Wicked!