The egosystem

There’s a lot of bloviating going on here in the blogosphere. (Free translation: there’s an unholy lot of self-referential navel-gazing going on among people who write weblogs). This isn’t new, of course; one of the first things that people used the then-new AltaVista engine for was to ego-surf to see how many times they could find their names listed. This always reminds me of Steve Martin in The Jerk. However, there’s precedent; after all, Google ranks pages in part by counting the number of links to particular pages, and academics have valued scholarly papers based on the number of following papers that cite them. Blogging just makes it easier to see who’s linking to whom (case in point: the truly cool Internet Ecosystem).

This leads to the development of what I call an egosystem, where the value of blogs is perceived to be related to how many links a blog has and where they come from. In the egosystem, if you get linked by a blog geek (and I mean that in a goodway) like Dave Winer or Tim O’Reilly , your blogcred goes up. If you get linked to by one of the uberbloggers– y’know, like Glenn Reynolds or Den Beste, well, you’re a star in the making.

The interesting thing to me about this particular egosystem (as opposed, say, to People Magazine or the Democratic National Commitee) is that it superficially seems to ignore the value of content in favor of link count and weight. Really, though, it does just the opposite– where a site like AmIHotOrNot presents context-free photos for you to rank, with a blog you get all the context you want– possibly more than you want, as in Eric & Dawn Olson’s continual blogged arguing. You can make decisions on whether something’s worthwhile or not by reading it! What a concept. (Of course, having said that, I shall be crushed if my BlogHotOrNot rating stays down near the 1.0 end of the scale.)

NZBear has an interesting discussion about the myopia of some parts of the egosystem. Most bloggers in a particular topic area– surprise– tend to stick together, so that warblogs, or blogs about technology, or blogs by garbage collectors, etc., have lots of back-and-forth, self-referential linking. He says “Bring on the blogs by ordinary people!” Amen to that.