An excerpt from comments at Cornwall SEO March 7 – 11, 2008:

Carlos Del Rio:
The major weight of links and references are to things that are accessible, not exceptional. Pages that amass large amounts of links are often remarkable (comment worthy) content that is not on the high end of the value spectrum.

Lyndoman:
Carlos if something is remarkable then it’s on the high end of the value spectrum, you seem to be arguing with yourself…

Carlos del Rio:
…Few people get excited about amazing. They are more likely to tell everyone “the iPod has a cute new color,” because everyone can enjoy being the first to talk about something that everyone already knows about.

Lyndoman:
@Carlos, I am more interested in content than products. Comparing one product company with another is not the same as comparing content.

If you can tell me where all the people who get excited about mediocrity live, I have a picture of paint drying to show them, if you are right, they will love it.

Carlos del Rio:
It isn’t a group of people, it is a class of behavior. The things that we talk about or link are more likely to be unnecessary interesting information than complicated things.

For example if you read two news stories one about fish rain in Singapore and another about a heart valve made of Gore-tex you are more likely to share the fish story. Both are remarkable occurrences, but only one is highly transportable.

Exceptional usually loses to accessible.

Lyndoman:
@Carlos, well you raise an interesting point, and it’s a factor that if you study communication deep enough you have to address.

“Dog bitten by Man Man bitten by dog [edited]” does not make an interesting story, but a human being has been injured. “Man bites dog”, far more newsworthy and yet a dog is less important.

What I think you are digging into are cultural factors which effect communication and should be taken into account when creating communication. However, most of us do it unconsciously, some of us make better communicators than others.

Some of of us can get more people to listen to us whilst others cannot. Low rent tabloid newspapers can hardly be called quality and yet they get a large readership. This is because in the tabloid world the stories are of high quality. “Bus found on Moon”, is a high quality tabloid story, although stick it in an encyclopedia and its quality soon drains away.

Context is everything.

So your examples of the heart valve and the fish rain can both be considered interesting high quality stories, but only to specific audiences who view it within the expected context.

Rupert Murdoch has become very wealthy on peddling trash, but it’s quality trash. And if you are a blogger, you are a writer, you are a publisher and the same rules apply.

Which brings us round to my original point, people are only interested in linking to quality.

It has been a couple of weeks, and I have let that interaction bubble in the back of my head. Is context everything? I can accept that, yes, context is everything. Does it change quality or value? No, context does not change anything but my expectations. Tabloids are still trash, I just expect less.

There is a band of quality that I expect in each area of life. I expect more from newspapers than I do from magazines. I think that USA Today is trash and I like Maxim, because they are held to different standards. But really, the value of their content to my life is not vastly different.

So I want to ask, honestly, what does context mean on the Internet?

Does innovation mean quality? Being funny and new gets lots of links right? It did for Stuff White People Like, right?

Well, yes and no. Stuff White People Like is an interesting look at context, it has been around for 3 month and has 90,000+ links and a book coming out in August. But compare that to Black People Love Us. Same game, making fun of stereotypes, since 2002. But BPLU only gets 13,000 links. Why?

Is there really that great of a difference in the quality of the two as satire? I don’t think so. Both sites are essentially the same shtick, but one is far more popular.

One of them is just much easier to talk about.