A couple of thoughts came in yesterday after my post on liking and linking. From @mattmoorek, a journalism student in Edinburgh,
Is to 'like' to link? Surely not. Linking is far more weighty. 'Liking' is ephemeral.
In our own comment thread, steven314 writes
Most of the 'likes' of facebook at the moment are instantaneous and throwaway: at that second, something is slightly better than anything else around and so someone "like"s it. ... The advantage of links is that they cost something to make: a small piece of your time to write a blog post or (maybe) even send a tweet. The cost of clicking a Like link is too close to nothing.
In an Economist special report in February, Kenneth Cukier describes the value of "data exhaust", the information we create accidentally as we wander around the web. As we choose an item in a list of search results returned by Google, for example, Google records that click and feeds it back into its search algorithm. That choice is a data point; it signals to Google which link was most valuable to you, information that can in turn improve the value of future search results. Mr Cukier calls this "spinning dross into gold".
More ...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/04/liking_and_linking
Comments