Ankhenaton - 5:11 am on Oct 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

What is the Internet good at? It's good for bringing together widely scatter people together with widely scatter items, information, groups, etc. If you have a small set of one or the other, the web is of little use. It's handy, but it doesn't change the rules of the game.

Just analysing:

The problem is that PI inflation of connecting sites [aka the once described above] dwarf any PI's of people actually writing producing all that content.

IE When I put my PhD on the web that took quite a couple of years to write and a lot of effort. Or someone writes 300 high quality pages on a new domain. Both cases have few chances to actually make reasonable money, but involve certainly more work than scraping the content and linking to it.

Google has, praise them, with adsense at least brought a wee chance of earning some return on that content investment. But we can ultimately only really get rid of spam if solid content pays as much or more than ripping loads of content off, you never worked on.

Spammers just recognised that concept and exploit it in various successful or unsuccessful variations.

There is a reason that libraries evolved in non net societies as people realised some intelligence has to go into indexing. Just picking the scroll that most people pointed to as it has the nicest cover and had many clever sounding words in it wasn't enough anymore.

So trust ranking evolved. etc etc .. We will see a repetition of age old society processes on the web. Wikipedia will collapse on the long run or adapt some form of government as large scale anarchy just doesn't work.

New society will be old society .. same species same problems, same solutions.

Thanks for ignoring this, flaming it etc, etc ;)