Links as online currency

In his blog, Jure Cuhalev, poses the question: "What do you think about linking? Would you agree to get payed and valued based on number of incoming links to your personal blog?"

Well, first of all, my technorati rating is low... I'm not active in the blogosphere and all that... so personally I'd rather not like to get paid based on my incoming links ;), but that's besides the point.... his basic idea is interesting: incoming links may tell us something about our authorativeness.

I don't think so...

I don't believe that incoming links tell us something about our authorativeness. Let me start with an counter example that dismays, imho, this idea: Paris Hilton. I just linked to her. Does this mean I think she is an authority? No, personally I'd rather  consider her as the anti-authoraty... still, she is famous. For what? I don't know, I don't care, and I don't even want to know more about her. The point is: links are nothing but relations. Simply basing a person's authority on incoming links is too simplistic. And though modern search enginges use algorithms based on links, this doesn't mean that these search engines care about authority. They just care about popularity. This is not bad in the search industry as most people are probably searching for the same stuff as other people. But we should be careful not to confuse confuse popularity with authority.

Yes, in science, scientists are probably more likely to get funding for their next study when their previous study has gained a lot of attention, i.e. is referenced (/ linked to) a lot. While even in science this approach is heavily debated (pure focus on quantity, not quality), scientific publications are more controlled than e.g. blog posts and other random rants. There are boards of editors that select the appropriateness of a publication, so just getting published is already a hurdle you've overwon, and hence some aditional proof adding to your authorativeness.

Sounds like Andrew Keen now? Well, in contrast to Mr. Andrew Keen, I actually do believe in wisdom of the crowds, but it requires more than counting the number of incoming links. Can wisdom ever be simplistic? Even when we improve the system, to add some weighting to the value of the incoming link, based on its origins link popularity, and so on, and so on, we don't know very much about the authors intent when an author links with a plain to an article.

If such an authorativeness measure should get into place, authors should at least be enabled to give meaning to their outgoing links. Enter the semantical web. We should be able to express things like 'agrees with', 'disagrees with', 'neutral' when linking to sources (feel free to add more). 'Disagrees with' should result in a reduction in the referenced source's authority, whereas neutral shouldn't affect the source much at all. Time to switch to the next version of the web? Or maybe a microformat will do? Yeah, I would really like to know it when something like this gets into place... or is there already such a proposal in place... somewhere?

Update (2009-06-03): should have looked a little further, cause I found it: http://microformats.org/wiki/vote-links