One aspect of blogs and the social web that is fascinating is how they operate on a cooperative game theory using seemingly counter-productive strategies for their mutual benefit. The extraordinary part is the massive size of the blogosphere and the number of people who participate in a cooperative manner.
The Nash equilibrium is a principle about how each participant makes decisions based on the best outcome for them and taking into account the decisions of other participants. Now, anyone who has seen A Beautiful Mind about the life of John Nash might remember how this can be manipulated by the participants form a collective strategy that seemingly runs counter to the best individual strategies, but how the end result is actually better for the participants. This is an example of cooperative game theory where a group of people act together for the collective best interest.
Blogs and Cooperative Game Theory
The idea of a blog is to attract people to your blog and get them to read through your articles. So, providing a link to another blog would seem a bad strategy because you are giving your reader a path to exit your blog and enter another blog. If the idea of your blog is to attract people and keep them, this would seem to run counter to that goal.
And yet, crosslinks and trackbacks are very popular in the blogosphere. A crosslink is when a blogger writes about another blog entry and links to it within the text of the blog. A trackback is an automated system in the blog software whereby a blogger can "ping" a blog article to tell it they have referred to the article in their blog post. These trackbacks are then shown on the original blog with a link to the new blog.
In both cases, the blog is generating a link to another blog, which would seem to run counter to the strategy of keeping readers on the website. Yet, in the long run, crosslinks and trackbacks do much more good than harm.
Trackbacks and Crosslinks Benefit the Blogger
The key to the idea is that by linking to other blogs you may lose some readers, but because other blogs are linking to your blog, you will also gain readers. So, while you will momentarily lose some readers, the crosslinks and trackbacks leading to your blog will introduce new readers to your blog. And, because some of these readers may become regulars to your blog, the net result is positive.
And, not only do these incoming links introduce new readers to the blog, they also result in better search engine optimization (SEO). Modern search engines like Google use the number of links to an article in determining how high to rank the article. So, a blog post with a lot of links to it will be listed more towards the top of the list in Google than a blog post without links, thus securing more visitors through Google.
Thus, the blogopshere becomes a system of cooperative game theory. The smart decision might seem to be to not link to other blogs so that you can keep readers on your own blog, but this turns out not to be the case. By linking to others, and trusting that others will link to you in a similar fashion, you gain more new readers and better search engine ranking.
The great thing is how self-perpetuating the system is now. For example, trackbacks are automated, so it is easy to crosslink to another blog in your post and then ping that blog to receive an incoming link from the trackback. But even without this automation, the system would continue on its own. An isolated blog without outgoing links would pale in comparison to a blog participating in the cooperative nature of the social web because it would not gain the incoming links to garner new visitors and raise its ranking in search engines. Thus, new participants can make an individual decision on the best strategy, and that individual decision will be aligned with the cooperative nature of the social web.
