Re^4: Node trackbacks?

Node reputation is supposed to be a indicator of popularity already.

Knowing only that there's a link from one node to another doesn't tell you much. Even PageRank takes into account the referring context; otherwise you'd rank a page highly only because there are 100 references to it saying "This is the most asinine, thoughtless comment ever".

[husker]

Rep measures popularity. Trackbacks measure relevance. I'm not going to link to an existing node because I really like it; I'm going to link to it because it relates to the node I'm creating now.

[swampyankee]

The idea of counting references to articles is fairly widespread in the scientific and engineering communities; a big chunk of "reputation" is how many other workers reference your articles. See, for example, Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks.

Frequency of citation is similar to, but not identical with, popularity. As an example, I would guess that no matter how many upvotes a responses in a poll, regardless of how many upvotes they get, are probably not the targets of many links.