Matt Craven has written an interesting piece about Dave Winer over at The Blog Herald.

Along with a personal assessment, he brings up a recent Scripting News post which speculates, “What does an algorithm think?” — something I’ve often thought about, especially when falling foul of Google’s.

Dave’s post doesn’t actually answer the question, but has a little moan about posts on Techmeme : “Most of the authors don’t know the first thing about technology, never took a computer science class, have never written code, and don’t admit that understanding tech is a prerequisite for writing about it.”

In other words, only code writers need apply.

Now, I usually put myself in the ignorant category, unfairly as you’ll see — but being unfair to oneself is better than over-spicing the pudding.

Back in the 1980s when real computers were IBM mainframes or PDP 11 “mini” computers, and the hoi-polloi like me had to make do with “micros”, which really were micro then, I had a startup called, Earlgate Computers. It developed and produced software for the Sinclair Spectrum, the BBC (Acorn) computer and one or two others, like the Atari and Commodore 64. All utter relics now.

Yours truly wrote a series of programs titled, Fitness Software, which was aimed at the running and marathon craze of the period. The packages, on cassette tape, were written in Basic, and the series sold to two big retail chains in the UK, Boots and W.H. Smith.

Even so, I wouldn’t claim I’m a developer or a programmer by today’s standards, although I have written commercial code. I usually muddle through with the latest gizmos and avoid too much complexity where possible.

Nevertheless, I do get onto Techmeme regularly, so presumably fall into Dave’s “waste of space” class. I think he’s probably right.

However, a word of warning. Narrowly-based communities that talk to each other in jargon incomprehensible to even an intelligent audience, really belong in a social network niche, not on mainstream tools of the blogosphere. People with peripheral skills and general interests can often bring new perspectives and shine light into dark corners otherwise missed.

As Matt writes, Dave comes across as an irascible sort of fellow, forever banging on about RSS and outliners. Not quite “Hold The Front Page!” stuff.

His other strand, U.S. politics in election year, is much better, even for a Brit like me. I happen to be very interested in who or what the next President of the U.S. of A. will be.

Now for the unanswered question : what DOES an algorithm think?

It doesn’t.

The mystery of the recent PageRank shake-up is beginning to settle down at last. Many sites, especially those running blog software, have taken a big hit.

For example, Techmeme has a PR of 4; the front page of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper, The Sun, is also on 4, as is The Blog Herald — which is now more like Problogger.net than a news source for blogging.

However, many starry personal vehicles and big blogs are now on 3, down from 6s and 7s, although the quirky BoingBoing retains its 7. Syntagma is in good company then with its current 4.

What seems to be happening is that Google has caught up with the decline in blogs and blogging and is rebalancing its system to account for the over-ranking of many dull and uninteresting sites.

The perception has also been out there for some time that blogs in general have been using crafty methods of making money. Text links are seen by Google to be optimization aids for getting a false PR. In many cases, of course, they’re more like the classified ads in newspapers — just someone selling something.

After a lot of consideration, and a recent steady uptick in our network income, Syntagma has reached the conclusion that this may be a good thing — with some reservations, namely, the unpredictability of the process.

Separating out the pros from the dabblers is never a bad move, especially as the internet is becoming increasingly a major centre for commerce as its technology improves.

Google’s move has also forced a rethink on many online businesses about being dependent on the self-interest of another company as the source of its traffic. When a complex and essentially artificial algorithm begins to behave like an out-of-control robot, you want to find a more stable place of safety for your income stream.

Google has clearly calculated that it can dispense with most of the income from small blogs with little traffic, regarding it as the price of a cup of coffee from a long, long tail.

Syntagma Media would gladly take this nuisance off the bigco’s hands. A Starbucks cup of cents from each of 200 million blogs would certainly perk up our balance sheet.

If you want to begin to understand the way Google is reconfiguring its pack of algorithms — much to the despair of its smaller commercial customers — you could do a lot worse than read I, Cringley’s latest article on PBS. It portrays the Mountain View operation as a giant can of worms.

[A] problem at Google right now is algorithmic optimization gone mad with the probable result that many of Google’s smaller AdWords customers will go broke this Christmas. Killing longtime customers is not a good corporate policy.

The upshot seems to be that Google is subject to the Law of Unforeseen Consequences, a well-known byproduct of increasing complexity. Worse, Google does not address these problems directly for fear of crashing its already wobbly customer service system. Now there’s a real bind.

We’re used to governments getting into hot waters like this, but they are operated by rather stupid people. Google is run by whizz kids with Stanford PhDs and brains the size of a minor moon of Jupiter.

What’s really going on here? “Algorithms — the smarter the better — are at the heart of Google’s success. But Google’s major failing nearly always comes down to confusing algorithmic efficiency with moral, ethical, or even business correctness. Sometimes good algorithms do bad things and the tendency at Google is to simply not care: it was the ALGORITHM’s fault.”

I’ve always suspected that Algy the Algorithm was a thoroughly nasty cartoon character. Like all such characters, he’s completely indestructible. Even if you flatten him to the floor he just pops up again worse than ever.

As Cringely puts it : “… recently Google started messing with AdWords, modifying algorithms and launching new programs that make the company look good to Wall Street, which is always seeking at least the appearance of improvement, but not to Google’s AdWords customers.”

At $700 a share it may be easy to break with its original customer base, but with the U.S. and world economies going sharply south, even Google may need the support of anyone it can get … maybe even those small-scale, under-capitalized guys who built their businesses alongside its growing infrastructure.