I’ll be at the Web Intelligence 2005 conference from 19 to 22 September and present a paper titled
“Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority” (pdf). The paper argues, using a real dataset, that a link is not always a vote-for and hence the most linked-to page is not necessarily the “best” page; in short, attention is different than appreciation. However, at the moment, HTML, the current language of the Web, allows to express only attention (just plain links and not the reason for the link) and hence PageRank is only able to detect the pages, people are giving attention to but not the one that are appreciated. The tipical example is a political candidate site under election times: everyone speaks about her but maybe many do it in order to criticize her (yes, think “Bush”). The paper basically recommends VoteLinks as a first step into adding some simple semantics to the “link language”. In brief, VoteLinks is one of several microformat open standards. We propose a set of three new values for the rev attribute of the <a> (hyperlink) tag in HTML. The new values are “vote-for” “vote-abstain” or “vote-against”, which are mutually exclusive, and represent agreement, abstention or indifference, and disagreement respectively.. So that, with the following HTML code, you can state that you link to a site but you do it for critizing it and search engines, aggregators and rankers should consider this.
<a rev="vote-against" href="http://georgebush.com/" title="miserable failure">Bush</a>.
Anyway I started this post because I’m just happy to say that, just as past AAAI conference, I’ll be again hosted by a HospitalityClub.org member: Jérémy, of course I don’t know now. The WI05 conference is in Compiegne, a small city close to Paris, but nevertheless there were 4 HC members, I messaged them and in fact one of them, Jeremy, offered to host me, cool! Since I’m going to finish my PhD soon, would you consider hiring a cheap researcher? Cheap in the sense that the university does not have to spend for my wandering around the world, of course ;-) See you in Compiegne if you are there or in Paris: on the 23th it is very likely I would be visiting the SonyLabs in Paris.