More than words, people
: G’bless Google for bringing advertising revenue — and, far more important, credibility — to weblogs and citizens’ media.
But Google is just the first step in the value chain.
For Google treats us as if we are just a collection of our words and it acts on the coincidences that occur in them: His page mentions “hosting,” so let’s put a hosting ad on it.
But we are more than coincidences and algorithms. We are people who expose our thoughts with our words and our relationshps with our links.
As Tim Oren said after ETech:
Links are not just citations. They are gestures in a social space, parts of conversations or other interactions. There’s an inherent value in looking at the dynamics of the record as it is created.
This inspired Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati>. Sifry said:
I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Tim Oren‘s succinct comments that links are a new kind of social gesture, too. I think that’s the most succint way of describing the phenomenon that we’re tracking at Technorati – behind every link, behind every post, behind every weblog is a person (sometimes more than one), and that person is making decisions on what to post and who to link to, and the linking process itself is not just a proxy for attention (as the Google guys understood) but it is a new form of social gesture – definitely something conversational, more public than email, more accountable than BBSes or Usenet News, more transparent than writing a letter to the editor. I’m still noodling over this, what the underlying metaphor is that we’re discussing…
Right. And there is a much deeper relationship to discover and forge here.
Henry Copeland’s BlogAds proves that. Look at this success story from a Congressional candidate who invested $2k in Blogads and made about $50k. That worked because it was more than a coincidence of words but was instead the building of a relationship.
That’s the next step in the value chain.
Now watch what Sifry invents next and there’ll be more steps beyond. Look at what he did with blog links to Amazon products and now imagine what a marketer could do with that: You want to predict the buzz and sales on a product, look at Sifry’s product cosmos page. You want to sell more books, track back to the blogs that link to these products and you’ll find the influencers who are talking about your products.
That’s another step.
And there are many more to come.
