Kevin Marks has a rather different ‘take’ on the matter of reputation in the modern world. So is ‘Google envy’ the new snobbery, Kevin?
Neel Krishnaswami is taking a very centralised view of reputation that smells of a synoptic delusion to me. The real revolution in online reputation is happening from the ground up, with Google being the prime example.
Google ranks webpages on how many pages link to them. It then repeats this process, weighting the links from highly linked-to pages higher. In effect, some pages have a higher reputation than others through an emergent mechanism created by all those individual links.
One can argue whether this is elitist or democratic endlessly, but it is certainly based on a Hayekian spontaneous order.
For example, I posted Two Kinds of Order by John Marks on March 11th, and mentioned this to some colleagues who might be interested. I linked to it from a Weblog or two, and Doc Searls did too.
Today it is number 1 on a search for ‘two kinds of order’ out of over 2 million, and a search for John Marks shows it in the top ten, despite there being lots of other John Marks’s on the net.
Have I piggybacked on Doc’s reputation? Yes, but only because he thinks what I and my father wrote is worth reading. If his readers disagree, they’ll stop linking to him, and his reputation will go down.
Cory explains this in more detail, and how a centralised effort can never match this.
