M. at the excellent Whuffie website comments on my recent post:

Following a trackback, I found this post by mac software developer Rainer Brockerhoff…

It appears that he sees links as a form of Whuffie, “hey ‘huckleberry thats a mighty large blogroll your hefting theya”. His large list of links gets him a ranking of 108th most prolific linkers at The Blogging Ecosystem.

…To borrow from wordsmith Tim Oren at Due Diligence : I am not sure if blogrolls are “fungible”. Meaning it is not a goods or commodities that is freely exchangeable. Really anyone could just take an entire top 500 (of 101,617) links and blogroll them onto a page. This would likely build some traffic.

I hasten to add that my primary intent in publishing my blogroll wasn’t to attract traffic as such; after all, it’s the actual list of feeds I’m reading, and therefore of interest to whoever analyses such connections.. When I said:

In the neverending quest for whuffie… I was checking who’s linking to me…

this was partly tongue-in-cheek. Appearing on someone’s blogroll is of course flattering per se; readers are always welcome. But of course current link-counting schemes such as TechnoRati don’t yet map accurately to real Whuffie.

M. goes on to say:

But to me when I scope a blogs ‘linkum, I expect it to have some relevance to the content. I especially like when they categorize or define the hyperlinks. My blogroll is a small list of blogs that I regularly visit and that seem to share some of the interests that I have.

…While, I try not to blog about blogging as too many sites exercise this masturbatory behavior, I think the idea of social networking and it’s complex application in the blogosphere is worthy of study. Check out this cool graph and indepth study from Ross Mayfield’s Blog.

Although my NetNewsWire subscription list uses groups to further categorize the subscriptions, unfortunately this is not reflected in the exported .opml file, which I’m mechanically converting to the form seen on the left. It would be very interesting to define standard keywords to add such value judgments to .opml files, and have everybody’s site reference those files in a <link> tag.

Ross Mayfield’s article is indeed very interesting and I had skimmed it (and some related ones) previously when the “power law” discussion came up. He says that “not all links are created equal”. I agree; first of all, blogroll links are more valuable than casual one-off references, as they represent people who read me every day. Also if someone whose weblog I read regularly, and whose opinions I respect, links to me, I feel more flattered than if it’s some random unknown… and of course, a casual link may even express disapproval of whatever I wrote, which should count as negative, not positive, Whuffie.

If I understand Mayfield’s articles correctly, he’s saying that simple non-weighted link counts chart “political networks”, which have power-law behavior. On the other hand, if links are weighted to properly show the make-up of “social networks”, a bell-curve distribution should show up, with a maximum network size of 150 people (that being, supposedly, the maximum number of people one can interact with on a daily basis without frying one’s neurons). Meg speculates that weblogging tools may possibly help us to go beyond the 150-person limit. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, 150 people were invited to Joi Ito‘s recent weblog party, and he rebuilt his blogroll afterwards to reflect that.

The whole Whuffie, group-forming, reputation-rating, community-forming, socializing-at-a-distance thing is fascinating. Writing this post yielded dozens of interesting references, which I’ll read and analyze later…