From Links to “Likes”

This article describes two different measures of reputation on the Web: Google’s PageRank which measures the impact of each page through the numbers of links to which the page is connected, and Facebook’s EdgeRank which measures the number of likes about a content, its social diffusion and redistribution and associates to it a measure of authority. These two measures represent also a different way of conceiving the relationship between the author and the text, given the role of the social image of the author in the second case. They also correspond to two different representations of the Web, conceived in the first case as a documentary space and in the second case as a Web of people.