How is value stored on the internet? It's simple.
Links.
This is, of course, obvious to any SEO.
For all the intellectual pondering over the attention economy, I am at least sure that links are the currency.
The proof point that inspired this post: Danny Hillis' new project: Freebase. They're building a structured database of free information on the web. Great stuff for splogging, spammers, etc. Might be useful as an alternative to wikipedia someday.
And how does Freebase get compensated?
"We only ask that you link back to us."
¶ 3/10/2007
Yahoo's going to build their own automated splog system. (Splogs are sites that are basically spam blogs - containing little original content - it's mostly scraped.)
Except Yahoo calls it "Brand Universe". GigaOM has some opinions on it.
Their first splog is wii.yahoo.com. Overall, it's embarassingly lame. Yahoo is announced they are going to build 100 more. Why only 100? That ain't a universe?
I wonder why they don't already have 100 sites up? How hard is this? The content is easily grabbed from the Yahoo APIs - including the Flickr pix, News and Blog results, Yahoo Answers topics, etc.
In fact, when I get a chance later today and tomorrow, I'm gonna build 100 brand universe clones, using the Yahoo APIs. Then I'll make sure that the news items / scraped content I put up gets linked from the real yahoo versions.
And I think I can get my ads more relevant and targeted as well... Should be fun.
¶ 2/01/2007
