The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?

The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.

So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).

tags: ad revenue, ad revenues, aol, assertion, blog, blogger, bloggers, bought, citation analysis, google economy, link value, linking, links, sale, sale price, sold, technorati, weblog, weblogs, weblogs inc, weblogsinc

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, stirred up the web4lib email list with a message about Authority and Findability. His message is about how services like Wikipedia and Google are changing our global information architecture and the meaning of “authority.”

The reaction was quick, and largely critical, but good argument tests our thinking and weeds the gardens of our mind. Argument is good. Here’s my side.

It’s important that we understand how modern search engines work. On the web, each link is a citation, and citation analysis is an important component among the many algorithms used to rank search results. Highly ranked content appears at the top because it is frequently cited (linked). This is obvious to many, but what is harder to fathom is that we (those who publish web content, anyway), not the search engines are responsible for identifying value on the web. Each link is a value statement about the resource we link to.

Think about that in the context of this comment:

Just because a document is findable, this does not mean that its contents are *better* or more truthful than a document that is not findable.

My point is that findability is in fact a measure of value. A perhaps incomplete and indirect measure, but one that has shown a remarkable ability to deliver valuable and useful information on demand.

Unfortunately, not all content is available online, and not all online content is linkable. Sadly, many web OPAC pages are not linkable, as is true of most every A&I and full-text database (or the content is linkable but inaccessible behind an authwall).

So now this quote:

As librarians, we are supposed to be experts on helping people find and retrieve quality information.

And I have to follow this with the following question: How better to help our patrons find high quality, accurate, and authoritative information than to take advantage of the search engines that already answer hundreds of millions of questions each day?

As stewards of knowledge, we need to understand the Google Economy. We need to build applications that embrace it. We need to invest the value that librarians bring to the search for knowledge in our online services.

Feh, libraries are full of people smarter than me. Hopefully they’ll forgive me for speaking out of turn.

tags: authority, citation analysis, findability, google, google economy, libraries, library, library systems, quality data, research methods, search, search engine, search engines, web opac, wikipedia

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.

Here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy

“Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. It is more complex than search ranking, and broader than interlinked web pages, though it draws meaning from both.

The Internet and World Wide Web have emphasized the role of the citation as a means of identifying the value of a resource. The structure of the print publishing world imposes strict limits on what information is promoted and distributed, but the web imposes much lower barriers to ‘publication,’ eliminating the old-media filters that information consumers once depended on to identify worthy information. Internet Search engines were developed to help navigate the growing number of web pages, but their results could not represent the value of individual pages until Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin started to apply the concept of citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Dr. Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania. Today, Google’s PageRank weighs heavily on citation analysis among the more than 150 criteria evaluated.

The result is that the PageRank of any single web page is highly dependent on the number of web pages that link to it (and their PageRank). The highest ranked pages appear at the top of the search results page. The financial implication for commercial web sites are obvious (and often exploited), but there are serious implications for non-commercial content as well. A person doing any research on the web will find his or her results heavily influenced by PageRank-style ranking. Accurate and correct information that is poorly linked will have lower ranking than incorrect or misleading information that is better linked. Because many of the most authoritative information sources — examples: medical journals, the Oxford English Dictionary — are subscription services, their content is not available for indexing by search engines, and by extension, to those using search engines for research.

Even among free services — many library catalogs, for instance — it can be difficult to index the information because of technical obstacles like dynamic URLs that make it difficult to deep link to content or explicit prohibitions in the robots.txt. The result is that a person searching for a book is far more likely to find the Amazon.com catalog page or blog posts discussing the book long before they will find any library offering the book for loan.
As with market economies, the Google Economy is subject to uncertainties, fluctuation, and occasional manipulation. Manipulators do so, however, at serious risk, as search engines have been known to blacklist them from results pages. Further, search engine engineers continue to refine ranking criteria to deliver quality search results. In general, however, there are three rules for full participation in the Google Economy:

• Linking must be possible
• Linking must be desirable
• Linking must be measurable

External links

• Roger Sperberg on the value of availability and permanence on the web
• David Rothman on hate sites and the Google Economy
• Casey Bisson on politics and the Google Economy, one of a number of his posts about the Google Economy
• Bernard Moonreports on the Google Economy from BlogBusinessSummit 2005
• Joe Griffin on marketing a web site in the Google Economy

tags: citation analysis, dr. eugene garfield, eugene garfield, google, google economy, information consumers, larry page, link, linking, links, media filters, print publishing, search, search engines, sergey brin, value, web pages, wikipedia, world wide web