# adding more information to links

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-03-14T04:37:19Z


Jon LebkowskyWhuffie in Links

The Emergent Democracy tribe's been discussing a possible enhancement of href links. Since Google's page ranking uses the number of times a page is linked as part of its algorithm, it might make sense to include other information about your evaluation of a page when you link to it.  The idea is to contribute your assessment of the whuffie (reputation) of the link, so that you wouldn't assign more credibility to a bogus page if you linked to it for some reason.  Broad implementation of a method like this could improve Google's assessment of value, and it might have other uses as well.

There's a debate about the best way to implement something like this.  My opinion is that you would add an attribute called "whuffie," after Cory Doctorow's term for reputation in the imagined future of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.  Whuffie could have a value of -10 to 10, so you might have <a href="http://www.weblogsky.com" whuffie="10">.This is a great opportunity to identify the blogroll from the entry. Various sections of your blogroll indicate a static vote of confidence about the blogs they point to, whereas entry links are more about the articles they point to. Blogstreet should look at only the blogroll, Blogdex, only the entry links and Technorati a combination of both. I guess the URL tells you, in a sense, if you are pointing at the entry or the blog, but you could make it explicit in the tag.

This meme reached mailing list escape velocity in only one day! Almost missed it. ;-)





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Emergent Democracy