I’ve always hated internet number gaming, and thought anyone who put stock in things like Alexa are dopes. Anyone with a site knows to look at their own stats and compare the reality to those pagerank guessing mindfuck sites knows that there’s what things like Alexa says, and then there are what your own stats actually say. And there’s numbers — and there’s influence. Then there are the ad- and tech-authorities’ various arguments about views and the bullshit blogs pull to get clickthroughs for ads and impressions, and the debate in vlogging over pre- vs. mid- vs. post-roll, and while sure, *some* people are making lotsa money, it’s still all bullshit and conjecture. And guessing and gaming. I know from personal experience. And shit like Pay Per Post = FAIL. And remember when everyone thought you had to own exactly the URL of your brand or company to “make it”? Anyone could see ten miles away that it was content and meaning and authenticity and a human face and and delivery of goods/information to rise to the top — and stay there. Think about all the number gaming that has failed. The pagerank era is dying.
Still no one knows what the fuck they’re doing. And I may be broke, but I’m having fun. But if there’s one thing I do know, it’s not *how many people* read your blog, it’s *who* reads your blog. The future is personality driven, and rocket-fueled by meaning. And that’s where the money will go, too.
That’s all my theory behind what makes this Data Mining post The End of PageRank so interesting:
(…) Of all the discussions, ideas and brainstorming that went on, one thing really seemed to emerge as a clear near/mid-term goal: transition from a web of documents to a web of people. I think this has been on the minds of many in both the research and industrial sphere. Issues of trust, influence, authority when applied to the web are essentially people based issues, the content being in a sense an artifact of these individuals. The PageRank era is marked by a very simple link with no explicit meaning and a simple assumption (a positive endorsement). Things are about to change! (…read all.)