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

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

tags: bias, biases, blog, bloggers, blogs, gender, gender differences, google, google economy, link, linking, rank, ranking, social life of information, technorati

I thought I was real smart when I modified the tags plugin to support integration with Technorati. The code was simple, just look in the tags.php plugin file for the foreach statements that run through the tags names and turn them into links on the page and change the $tags[] = statement to look something like this:

$tags[] = “<a href=\”“.get_tag_link($row->tag_name).”\“ target=\”$target\“ rel=\”tag\“ title=\”More “.$row->tag_name.” at {site name}\“ >”.$row->tag_name.“</a> <a href=\”http://technorati.com/tag/“.$row->tag_name.”\“ target=\”$target\“ rel=\”tag\“ title=\”Find “.$row->tag_name.” at Technorati\“ ><img src=\”http://{path/to}/technorati-bubble.gif\“ /></a>”;

But thinking you’re smart isn’t enough. Example: I fixed the tags to Technorati integration only to find that modifying the post in Ecto would delete all the tags and geolocation information I’d worked so hard to enter. Yeah, I’m working on that.

Technorati Tags: php, plugin, integration, tag, tags, technorati, wordpress