I just finished giving a presentation at the Web Intelligence Conference in Compiegne (France). I tried to push the concept of VoteLinks. The presentation is in S5 (so pure standard XHTML+CSS+JS) and CreativeCommons licenced: Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority (presentation) with the accompanying paper (pdf). Nothing earth-shaking at all, really. The main (simple) concept was that “Attention != Appreciation”, the most linked to page is not necessarily the most appreciated: I might link to gwbush.com in order to criticize it but my link increases its PageRank (something I don’t want). At the moment, HTML does not allow to express the reason behind a link, but VoteLinks microformats will allow to add some semantics to linking language. For example, you could say something like
<a href=”http://forza-italia.it/” rev=”vote-against”>berlusconi</a>
<a href=”http://romanoprodi.it” rev=”vote-abstain”>prodi</a>
<a href=”http://ivanscalfarotto.info”rev=”vote-for”>scalfarotto</a>
In the paper I also give evidence of the (intuitive) fact that “Attention!=Appreciation” with a simple experiment on a real, huge community with positive and negative links.
I thought it would be good to have the Web Intelligence community knows about VoteLinks and other microformats. And actually only 1 person (out of a number of people raging from 10 to 30) had heard of VoteLinks before, so the goal of spreading knowledge was accomplished.
And feel free to link to the presentation of course … hopefully not with a rev="vote-against" link!! ;-)
Tomorrow I go to Paris for giving a demo at SonyLabs and then meeting with Alf.
My trip was once more time sponsored by HospitalityClub/CouchSurfing: in Compiegne I was hosted by Jeremy and in Paris by Antonello. Too cool! Try it yourself, you always met great people!