Social media - the emergence of new attention regulators Posted: February 2007 C: Internet Posted by: K. Panayotakis

At a risk of being commonplace, I have written a piece on the so called ‘web 2.0’.

The web is flooded with information (more than 40 million active web sites & more than 55 million blogs). Information on the same subject can be found at thousands even millions of different web pages. This infoglut has been causing major confusion to users and affecting the info search effectiveness.

The introduction of link analysis algorithms has been a major milestone, since it improved dramatically search effectiveness and prioritization of content. A link to another site is considered as a vote of confidence to that other site (the equivalent of a reference in bibliography). However the emergence of search engines as major traffic sources and the publicity on the link analysis algorithms, has led to the development of artificial link building approaches (link buying, link exchanges etc) which produce bias.

The link analysis rankings resulting from the execution of the pagerank algorithm (‘the Google dance’) are eventually complemented by a set of distributed rankings, produced by manual user voting of content reviewed. This voting is processed at the so called ‘social media’ which are running popularity contests, and regulating the attention of their users ( delicious, is one of these new ‘attention regulators’). A huge information evaluation network is rapidly evolving (web 2.0) and shall contribute to the search experience enhancement. However the emergence of tens of web 2.0 social bookmarking services, creates an unstable situation which is expected to consolidate in the future. According to a recent analysis by readwriteweb ‘the social bookmarking market is dominated by del.icio.us and StumbleUpon’ .

On the other hand, link based ranking approaches are trying to evolve to more mature evaluation approaches. For example they try to categorize links according to their quality or trustworthiness. Inbound links from .org .edu are of higher value due to the high trust on educational or not for profit institutions.

The publication & info diffusion process will never be the same.