Apparently the internet isn't as interconnected as we've been told. It's interesting having real numbers on what seems intuitive; that not all pages will be highly connected but there will be a bell curve distribution. The fact that many people point to the same page is simply confirmation of what happens in any statistically large system: If one of a set has only a small advantage then after many choices that single one will be very highly selected. And that there are 'islands' in the internet I think are different hubs each obeying their own bell curves. I've a feeling that a lot of what this study has found are artefacts of the assumption that there is a single centre to the net. What I don't like about this study is that it's going to be misinterpreted for people with vested interests to mean that the users aren't interested in independent publication, and that makes me nervous. What is ought to do is inspire the MSNs of this world to link more to individual sites (which in fact the BBC News site does quite well). Something else that makes me nervous:
"If you know who's linked to you, then perhaps you know your content is valuable. (You might say) 'Hey, let's throw up a royalty, a fee for pointing to me'"
Now that's just fucking stupid, but people are really thinking like this! How can people be saying this when everyone else is working on XML and free syndication? Let's put aside the fact that a royalty would never work, but what sort of internet does this person want? You'd end up with a collection of online cdrom presentations, endless duplicated content, nothing building on anything; metacontent sites would all have editiorial biases. Okay it'll never be as bad as that, but this is an attitude that indy content providers are going to have to contend with in the future. The answer? Make it easy to jump in and jump out of your site - no frames and give context on every single page. Make it easier to link so that people really feel confined when they go onto a 'sticky' site.
Apparently the internet isn't as interconnected as we've been told. It's interesting having real numbers on what seems intuitive; that not all pages will be highly connected but there will be a bell curve distribution. The fact that many people point to the same page is simply confirmation of what happens in any statistically large system: If one of a set has only a small advantage then after many choices that single one will be very highly selected. And that there are 'islands' in the internet I think are different hubs each obeying their own bell curves. I've a feeling that a lot of what this study has found are artefacts of the assumption that there is a single centre to the net. What I don't like about this study is that it's going to be misinterpreted for people with vested interests to mean that the users aren't interested in independent publication, and that makes me nervous. What is ought to do is inspire the MSNs of this world to link more to individual sites (which in fact the BBC News site does quite well). Something else that makes me nervous:
"If you know who's linked to you, then perhaps you know your content is valuable. (You might say) 'Hey, let's throw up a royalty, a fee for pointing to me'"
Now that's just fucking stupid, but people are really thinking like this! How can people be saying this when everyone else is working on XML and free syndication? Let's put aside the fact that a royalty would never work, but what sort of internet does this person want? You'd end up with a collection of online cdrom presentations, endless duplicated content, nothing building on anything; metacontent sites would all have editiorial biases. Okay it'll never be as bad as that, but this is an attitude that indy content providers are going to have to contend with in the future. The answer? Make it easy to jump in and jump out of your site - no frames and give context on every single page. Make it easier to link so that people really feel confined when they go onto a 'sticky' site.