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« The scaling laws of human travel | Main | Critical Mass in User Communities »
23 February 2007
One of those interesting phenomena that I have noticed is the gaming of the google algorithm (at its foundation, a network-based algorithm utilizing various measures of network centrality) through posting of comments to this blog. In the google world we live in, the more links that point to you, the more traffic you get. And more traffic equals money. Given the growing importance of blogs in the web, a number of services have sprung up to place comments on blogs to point to some website. For a while, the comments were easy to pick out-- for example-- "great blog. www.---.com". More recently, however, the text of these comments are more specific to the entry, but often barely intelligible-- which may reflect some natural language automated system, or individuals who are being paid to post quick sentences with links to many blogs. Anyhow, it is both an interesting cat and mouse game on the world wide web, and a bit of an annoyance (a la spam) for us. We are generally catching these, but if one gets by, let us know.
Posted by David Lazer at February 23, 2007 10:31 PM