Well, my comment was meant to distinguish between your examples of quality and other metrics of utility. You gave the example of popular singers, and popular singers might not be the "best singers" in the sense of musical quality, but they entertain a lot of people a great deal. The unnammed woman who stirred up an online community got a lot of traffic, and she might not be well-liked, but clearly she provoked a lot of discussion and interest (if only rubbernecking entertainment sort of interest) among people linking to her and reading articles about her, so there's an element of usefulness in what she did.
You say that Google's idea is "...that if a lot of people cite you, you must be on to something." I'd refine this to say that if a lot of people cite you, you must be providing some kind of thing that those people value.
My thoughts on your $20 scenario --
- I think part of the problem here is that an offer like that on the internet isn't very credible. If I were reading that page, I would be unlikely to actually get 20 dollars, because I probably wouldn't take it seriously enough to email you. As a result, that page isn't really very useful in a certain practical sense.
- If you were able to make it credible somehow, and even one person stumbled across the page, emailed you, and received 20 dollars, I bet that you would get a very large amount of readers very fast. If your page was accessible to search engines, I suspect that you might get that one person (and a later flood of people once word spread) without any promotion at all, eventually.
I think we're engaged in a bit of circular reasoning here.
You're saying that because readers would be skeptical of the $20 offer, it really isn't useful (provide value). And since there are links, there must be value. But by defining "value" as providing links, you're using the metric Google has set up -- so of course those with more links will have more value, because you don't have any other measurement!
The $20 shows that there can be real value in a post or article and yet have no links. So the links=value formula does not hold at the margins. There is always a disconnect between future perceived value of the article after consumption and degree of gossip in the popular world. They're anything but directly related. But they are loosely enough related to work mostly.
I think I see what you're saying. By having to make the $20 offer credible, you're engaging in the sort of "marketing" that you wouldn't need to do if the inherent value somehow shone through on its own, right?
OK, I agree with that. I wonder whether it's ever possible to do any better, though.
You say that Google's idea is "...that if a lot of people cite you, you must be on to something." I'd refine this to say that if a lot of people cite you, you must be providing some kind of thing that those people value.
My thoughts on your $20 scenario --
- I think part of the problem here is that an offer like that on the internet isn't very credible. If I were reading that page, I would be unlikely to actually get 20 dollars, because I probably wouldn't take it seriously enough to email you. As a result, that page isn't really very useful in a certain practical sense.
- If you were able to make it credible somehow, and even one person stumbled across the page, emailed you, and received 20 dollars, I bet that you would get a very large amount of readers very fast. If your page was accessible to search engines, I suspect that you might get that one person (and a later flood of people once word spread) without any promotion at all, eventually.