Blogs, links and influence

When Mary Hodder of Napsterization digs into a subject, stand back and look out, world!

In her latest, "Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts" (caution, techie talk here), Mary follows up on a discussion begun first at Les Blogs in Paris and then at BlogHer last weekend -- namely, that raw link counts and Top 100 standings don't tell you much. What's more meaningful are the social interactions that take place within niche topic groups. She goes on to suggest the ingredients of an open source algorithm around blog influence. Excerpt:

I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others. What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I'm seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I'm at the point where I'd like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us. ...