Subtlety

Two prob­lems, two solu­tions, and a trite conclusion:

The prob­lem with links, in the con­text of weblogs, is that they are assumed to be endors­ments by the linker of the file being linked to. Not, of course, by the real human reader, who can eval­u­ate a link in con­text, but by the unthink­ing spider sent out to read weblogs by the search engines, aggre­ga­tors and fil­ters that we rely upon to find con­tent - espe­cially ephemeral, of-​the-​moment con­tent - on the web.

For exam­ple, if I link to the British National Party, I am improv­ing its rank­ing on Google and insert­ing it into the indices of Blogdex, Memigo et al. In short, I am, albeit infin­ites­si­mally, cast­ing a micro­con­tent vote for the BNP.

This is not ideal. I don’t agree with the BNP, to put it mildly, and my link to them ought to reg­is­ter that fact. The devel­op­ers at Tech­no­rati (one of the more sophis­ti­cated track­ers of weblog link­ing activ­ity) have cot­toned on to this and pro­pose an inter­est­ing solu­tion: VoteLinks. With­out get­ting too tech­ni­cal, the Tech­no­rati team are sug­gest­ing a way to flag links on a web page with a vote for the con­tent being linked to, a vote against it, or an abstention.

You won’t be able to see the dif­fer­ence but this link to the BNP reg­is­ters my dis­ap­proval of their site’s con­tent, rather than simply point­ing to it and, there­fore, implic­itly endors­ing it. Future appli­ca­tions designed to track link­ing activ­ity across weblogs and web­sites will be able to reg­is­ter this dis­ap­proval, aggre­gate it with the dis­ap­proval of others, or weigh it against the approval of others still. The result: dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between fame and noto­ri­ety, with link­ing as com­men­tary rather than simple point­ing. Sweet.

Sim­i­larly, the prob­lem with the social net­work­ing sites (aside from the fact that they are essen­tially point­less) is their binary approach to rela­tion­ships. A fellow user of Friend­ster is either friend or not-​friend. When rela­tion­ships are so bluntly defined, the use­ful­ness of a vast, brows­able net­work of related people dimin­ishes with every con­nec­tion made. There is, obvi­ously, a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the Friend­ster I’ve known since child­hood and the Friend­ster I met in a night­club once six months ago, and mark­ing both rela­tion­ships as the same breaks the social func­tion­al­ity of the site.

Flickr, the social net­work meets photo shar­ing meets live chat site that launched Tues­day last, pro­vides a solu­tion. The site has been gar­ner­ing much praise for actu­ally having a point - the focus is firmly on the photos - but taking it for a spin last night, I was as impressed by the rubric for cat­e­goris­ing rela­tion­ships as I was by the slick inter­face. Instead of simply flag­ging some­one as a friend, you can rank them as Acquain­tance, Friend, Best Buddy or Soul Mate. The word­ing is mawk­ish, read­ing like an Amer­i­can take on the pri­mary school play­ground demo­tion (‘Get out of the sand­pit! Eric is my best buddy now!’), but the com­par­a­tive sub­tlety should give Flickr a longer shelf-​life than the count­less net­work­ing sites I’ve joined, only to lose inter­est in within a month.

The point? Sub­tlety is good. I might be look­ing at this through weblog-​tinted spec­ta­cles, and this point is a com­mon­place for fellow trav­ellers, but it seems that where I once saw the web as an archive of infor­ma­tion to be mined for research, that archive now seems to sit beneath a web of people; people who filter and medi­ate by making links. Where infor­ma­tion can often be ranked simply (not always, I know, but often), uncov­er­ing the links between people, their views and tastes, cannot. These subtle tweaks to the way we make links, be they social or hyper, aren’t just inter­est­ing, they’re fast becom­ing essen­tial if we are to have any chance of nav­i­gat­ing the mas­sive messy morass of infor­ma­tion that is the web.

Not unre­lated:Blog Dis­cus­sion and Cita­tion, Flickr - Birth of an online com­mu­nity.

Posted at 4pm on 12/02/04 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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Tags: flickr, ideas, web