Via A via B via C

This is mainly a reminder so I can find it later, but Prof. Paquet over at Many-to-Many points to Mr. Blaze’s post on the rumor and citation process within the blogosphere.

While this has little to do with the larger social issues of attribution, and the communication issues of iteration and gossip, it would be nice to be able to track the link chains. There should be a way to do this in Moveable Type, using the posting bookmarklet, but the question is where to store the data and how then to display it.

More specifically, does it make sense to generate a parallel set of trackbacks that remain invisible (in meta tags)? If you did, you could add the chain of trackbacks to your own trackbacked articles. This wouldn’t work well for posting comments (because a single post would propagate up some potentially long chains), but it might then be easily exploited locally to provide a list of pages that were linked.

The alternative, of course, is to track shared links within posts from a central server. Is anyone already doing this? It seems as if it would be relatively easy to do, assuming you have data unitized at the post level (e.g., via RSS). I’ve done this with toy data, maybe I should play with that a bit. It’s not like I have any research to get done or owe anyone papers or anything.

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6 Comments

  1. Posted 1/21/2004 at 8:24 pm | Permalink

    not being one for propriety, but is seb a prof. or a dr. and what are the norms. i though he was a dr. ala ph.d. and not a prof. ala someone in the professorial track at a university. did he move? i may have missed it. sorry, just unsure about these things in general.

  2. Alex
    Posted 1/21/2004 at 9:31 pm | Permalink

    Good question, and one Seb would best be able to answer. I am of the opinion that anyone with the doctorate may be properly addressed as Professor. I don’t particularly care for many medical doctors (something about the profession attracts or turns them into jerks in many cases, IMHO), so I tend to avoid the Dr. Not that I am insulted when people address me as such–and in fact, that is far more common than calling me Prof. I don’t know whether the title appropriately goes to those only who teach. Seb’s employed as a researcher, and it strikes me that others at research labs are often Profs…

    I can’t say that I dislike the title, though I’m just as happy with Alex–“hey you” also seems to work.

  3. Posted 1/21/2004 at 10:27 pm | Permalink

    hey you doesn’t often work for me, but it does sometime. i don’t think it matters as much in the u.s./canadian titles, but i think, at least from what i’ve been led to believe matter alot in those institutions where only the head of the department or research group is entitled to professor. and only those people with a doctorate, which in many countries is a degree beyond the ph.d. can be called dr. honorifics are a pain.

  4. Posted 1/22/2004 at 1:29 pm | Permalink

    First time I’ve been called Prof. I don’t currently teach, so I was surprised. But I do like it better than Dr. (argh)

    Still, honorifics are a pain. Call me Seb.

  5. Posted 1/23/2004 at 9:54 am | Permalink

    while i don’t like dr. i do sort of like the diminutive form of Doc. like Doc. Holliday, or Doc. Strange, etc. it has a ring to it, but perhaps i am too much of the lone ranger tv show generation, i dunno.

  6. Posted 1/23/2004 at 10:48 pm | Permalink

    Pity then some countries where the convention is, if you have two doctorates, to be called by both: Herr Dr. Dr. Strange.

3 Trackbacks

  1. By Your Guess Is As Good As Mine on 1/21/2004 at 8:40 pm

    Backtrack the Trackback
    One might agree that following a thread in a scale-free network is more than a notion

  2. By Your Guess Is As Good As Mine on 1/21/2004 at 8:49 pm

    Backtrack the Trackback
    One might agree that following a thread in a scale-free network is more than a notion

  3. By Your Guess Is As Good As Mine on 1/21/2004 at 8:59 pm

    Backtrack the Trackback
    One might agree that following a thread in a scale-free network is more than a notion

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