This is just one of my passing thoughts, which I suspect is understood by many, but not necessarily expressed this way:
Google’s PageRank is, for all practical purposes, a form of social networking applied to the concept of a particular html tag. The ranking system is built upon the idea that someone, somewhere, decided that something on their web page was so associated with another web page that it needed to be wrapped in <a> </a> tags with the web page’s address referenced. Thousands (millions!) of people finding it imperative to add these tags around their text, and thereby making it possible to judge the importance of specific web sites by aggregating these millions (billions!) of tags. Will we look back at this and call it the beginning of social networking on the web?
the thought passed through my head while reading Stefano’s Linotype…
