[The ad guy/blogger and Jeff are] both wrong. No matter what you think of Google now, calling PageRank “evil” is absurd–it was a huge step forward that helped us understand what we’re paying attention to and, as Jeff notes, what we value. But today PageRank and all its imitations are fatally flawed–links and pageviews don’t necessarily equal actual attention (and to pick up Doc Searls’ argument, they tell us almost nothing about actual intentions). Of course they still work well enough for our current search needs, but let’s look a few years down the road (keeping in mind that the amount of information being produced is doubling every 2-3 years, and less than two percent of it is online right now, according to Alex Barnett.

There’s a noticeable amount of crap gumming up the system already–trackback spam, anyone? What’s it going to be like in ten years when (if Alex is right) we’ll be churning out 160 million terabytes of data on an annual basis and presumably a lot more than two percent of it will be online? Think counting links will do us much good then?

We need something better than links to represent where our attention is going and thereby assign value to everything in our information-based economy. We don’t need it today or even next year, but sitting around talking about how useful links still are won’t get us anywhere.

The interesting stories will be how, having tasted freedom of expression absent arbitrary editorial control, American internet users (and those whose countries subjugate to Washington whims) respond with alternatives. Could the world of mail-exchanging BBS’s that phone each other in the night return, to bypass the internet censors?

I’ll really believe the revolution has arrived when these people start to use the technqiues they claim to be experts on themselves. This is not unique to media pundits, the dailyKos web site is also holding a real face-to-face conference this weekend in, of all places, Las Vegas.