Back in 1996, when I first surfed the web, the Internet was just a network. Now, it’s a complete world. A world of worlds, actually. Have you ever wandered what is the currency of the Internet? What makes it move every day, every hour, every minute, every second? If there is a world, there have to be money. Or a form of money, a currency, something that you exchange for your basic needs every day.
I had to ask this question in a more serious manner these days. I was in the 2000 bloggers project, actually I am still in, even with a little mashup. For those of you who lived on Mars for the last week, there was a project started by Tino Buntic, in which he created a random window of the blogosphere, by making a photo wall of the faces of 2000 bloggers. Nothing evil, after all. But what followed was completely unexpected. Each and every blogger, proud to be in that nice face-wall, put the collage in his blog. Which exploded into a 2000 link block to other 2000 blogs. That they had another 2000 links and so on. The link factor got crazy.
Technorati had to review their link ranking policy, and, to be honest, that was the exact moment when I realized that something was wrong. Or not totally clear. Or just a little foggy. And then it hit me: the link is the currency on the internet. It is the only thing that make it grow and live each and every second. This is the blood that actually runs through the internet veins.
The 2000 bloggers was just an inflation. An unexpected boost of the currency on the market, with no tangible coverage. It’s the same with real life inflation, when you just print out money without coverage. In this case, of course, there is a coverage, but we’ll talk about that later.