Implicit kicks explicit's ass

There are two things being said here:

1. Implicit is better because it avoids people's corrupted "conscious" minds.

2. Implicit is better because it is harder to game.

The corollary to #2 is: An implicit system can, in fact, be gamed, but it requires cleverness/sleuthing/persistence/money/massive organization/etc/etc...whatever the situation calls for. Google uses 40+ variables to determine what gets on the front page. Digg uses 1 variable.

...if something smells funny on Digg's front page, it's usually pretty clear, and it's pretty obvious _what_ is going on. There's one method to game Digg, and because of the simplicity, the community and the admins should be able to put in counter-measures that are equally simple. With google...eh. Who knows? It's security through obscurity. One thing is certain: The well-pageranked of google are an enduring elite, whose only real enemies are the heuristic wizards deep within google itself.

This is is obviously true. However, the problem has always been in figuring out which implicit vars lead to explicit insights about your ecosystem and how strong that association is. Implicit tracking also opens some privacy questions. Generally a good line of thinking though.

the url has barfed (404) try http://breasy.com/blog/2007/06/30/implicit-kicks-explicits-ass/

link is fixed now