The founder of spurl.net, Hjalmar Gislason, in an interview made an excellent point about technorati's "who's linking to me functionality": It is narcissistic. He also said, they should introduce "who is he/she linking to" functionality. I hadn't thought of that. But, it is a great idea!
The general feeling I get from many of the social systems today - including the blog tracking systems - is that their main use (and seemingly main expected use) is a bit Narcissistic. Take Technorati as an example. The main use for the tool is almost certainly to look up "who is linking to me?", but it would be at least as interesting to see "what is this blogger linking to?". The data is already there in Technorati's database - so it shouldn't be much of a problem to add. The really interesting things start to happen when you combine the two and do two-way analysis of the flow of ideas and links from one blog to the other through the entire network of blogs. A lot of people have talked about this kind of ideas but I've not seen a proper implementation of it. In any case Technorati is probably in the best position to do it as they seem have the most data.
Thanks Peter,
There is a little bit more on these notes in this blog entry that I wrote a while back: The Origins of Our Ideas
In case anybody want's to dig deeper into that philosophy.
Posted by: Hjalmar Gislason | July 28, 2004 at 10:31 AM