Do we have a link-value-crash on our hands(/cursors)?

There’s a fair bit of ‘madness’ going on with good-old link-love. Basically the web has three main currencies, they are money, links, and reputation, in that order. Because of the advantages of programmatically aggregating and analysing the link ecology ‘organic’ search engines have over the last decade been partly responsible for something of a boom in the value of links, especially inbound links.

Aside, who else enjoys the poetic irony that ‘organic’ search actually means automated computational and virtually entirely abstract?

But I am wondering if we are not crashing head long into a link-equity bubble burst. Wikipedia have, allegedly to try and dissuade spamming, added ‘nofollow’ parameters to all outbound links effectively turning it into a massive black-hole of link value, depending on weater or not Google and their likes honour the ‘nofollow’ parameter. My guess is they will occasionally change the extent to which they honour it as part of their strategies for staying one step ahead of SEO.

Either way, with things like links-for-the-sake-of-links projects like 2000 bloggers, and random link generators, link meaning might fast be becoming a thing of the past, that is unless we can get the semantic-web off the ground.

Perhaps a crash in link value would be a good thing, increasing again the value of reputation which may have positive growth implications for localisation, hyper-local-ism if you will, which will hopefully counter the ‘great-homogenization’ and further flatten the ‘long tail’ nature of the web.