Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.

On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available. But then, this is a teenager, and maybe practical matters like work don’t top the list. And that’s where Not A Pretty Librarian (who are you?) asks:

Can you imagine being nineteen right now without computer access?

Indeed, when college students are spending so much time on AIM and logging into Facebook daily, is a car really as important as a computer in a teenager’s social life? When 89 percent of students start their research in a search engine, isn’t the computer more important than a car to get to the library?

car, computer, computer use, importance, internet, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, not a pretty librarian, teen, teenagers, value, web

April 15 has been tax day in the US for as long as anybody can remember, but with the weekend and all, most of us have ’til Monday to file and some of us in the Northeast have ’til Tuesday.

The thing I don’t like about tax time is that it brings out the worst in me. Most any other time of the year I’m a pinko liberal, but the anticipation of taxes makes me look decidedly conservative and ornery. An example from last year might include the herculean efforts I went through to donate an old vehicle before ‘less advantageous’ 2005 tax laws took effect.

And though my taxes for this year have been filed for some time (about 27 hours now), I’m ashamed to have to admit now wondering about the tax value of my blood donations.

I wasn’t surprised to find mention of this at Halfbakery and WhyNot? at the top of the Google results, but I was surprised to learn that blood might be best valued at about $250 per unit. I’d been estimating $25, based on what I’d heard about what I’ve heard people get paid for plasma.

One recent study of over 400 college students, age 18 to 22, found that 10 percent have sold their Blood plasma at least once for cash payments of from $9 to $20 per visit. Of that group, three out of five are former Red Cross donors who stopped donating Blood for a lollipop and a T-shirt when they started selling their plasma for cash!

eHow, meanwhile, tells prospective plasma sellers to check at their nearest college campus for information on the nearest plasma collection center.

But just as my friends began to worry I’d be forever stuck on this tax write-off thing, I discovered “The Blood Brokers, How The Gift Of Life Became A Billion Dollar Business” and remembered my liberal ways again.

blood, blood as commodity, blood donation, blood economy, charitable donations, plasma, plasma collection, red cross, tax write-off, taxes, value

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:

The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.

tags: availability, big stick, dictum, findability, google, google economy, idea, ideas, influence, search, search results, value

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

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.

In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.

Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls. Jenny concludes that the move might have sold an extra subscription here or there, but completely killed the online linking that made LJ’s articles so authoritative in search engines.

Roger at Electric Forest struck to the heart of this recently:

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

In this new world, value is measured by search engine rankings, which are largely a measure of the number of links pointing to a resource. Because it’s impossible to link to things behind authwalls, or to material that isn’t online at all, Google et all have turned that scarcity = value equation on its head.

Today, in order to be relevant…in order to gain value, material must be available, linkable, indexable, and usable. Over the long haul, the best way to increase your Page Rank is to create outstanding content and make it freely available to everyone.

This is (part of) what got Zach blogging and it’s exactly what make’s Google’s non-hierarchical world work. Soon to be very related: social bookmarking as made famous by del.icio.us, now Yahoo! feature.

tags: accessibility, accessible resources, authoritative, electric forest, google, google economy, information, jenny levine, new york times, oclc, scarcity, scarcity = value, search engines, the shifted librarian, value, value equation, value theory