Rethinking Linking

This is a series of articles on re-imagining how links can work in the semantic social web. My interest is investigating what could be regarded as the central dogma of the web for the last ten years: that hyperlinks confer authority. It's the central dogma of Google, and it's also the fundamental to the social web.

"This seems to capture a kind of collaborative trust, since if a page was mentioned by a trustworthy or authoritative source, it is more likely to be trustworthy or authoritative."

-- Page, Lawrence and Brin, Sergey and Motwani, Rajeev and Winograd, Terry (1999) The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.<!-- Unique to ILPubs --> Technical Report. Stanford InfoLab.

"Hyperlinks encode a considerable amount of latent human judgment, and we claim that this type of judgment is precisely what is needed to formulate a notion of authority. Specically, the creation of a link on the www represents a concrete indication of the following type of judgment: the creator of page p, by including a link to page q, has in some measure conferred authority on q... Of course, there are a number of potential pitfalls in the application of links for such a purpose. First of all, links are created for a wide variety of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the conferral of authority."

-- Kleinberg, Jon M. Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment. Proc. 9th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998. Extended version in Journal of the ACM 46(1999). Also appears as IBM Research Report RJ 10076, May 1997.