tail -f /dev/mind > blog
Then, of course, I realised just how recent 1999 was. I started thinking "Do things change that fast?" Then I realised, no they don't. Things still changed slowly, but if you only see the back end of the exponential adoption curve, it looks a lot faster.
The linking patterns of weblogs did not subvert or corrupt PageRank, they simply altered the web in such a way that PageRank became less relevant, and no longer answered that question. Rather than taking the negative approach, working against the new shape of the web, patching the problem by marking down a certain class of page, Google needs to find a new positive approach, to adapt to the new shape of the WWW and work with that to once again find the answers.