This means that Google is actually much closer to the price mechanism in terms of it’s information aggregation process, because the Google rankings emerge as a second order effect from the nature of links on the internet.

By the same token, those who succeed in having a viable net experience, whether it be doing business, seeking information, conecting with other people, or what have you, take the same fresh approach. They greet the unforseeable on its own terms.

That’s a fascinating comment, but to draw on what Alan said in the first comment, what is a linker giving up? In my blog, I tend to link only rarely, perhaps because I’d like to both focus my readers’ attention on a small set of things, but perhaps because an out-link is competition for attention between myself and someone else?

You could do worse than look at Yochai Benkler’s piece on sharing nicely which touches on some of these issues: http://benkler.org/SharingNicely.html

You might think more about how the Wikimedia Foundation resembles a government central bank and how to structure things to avoid the negative effects Hayek expects from central bank operations.

One might perhaps be able to speak of the economy (using that word very loosely) of links in the blogosphere in terms of a price analogy, in that individual links are under individual control while the wider universe of links is not. This might be a fruitful avenue for investigation (indeed, the impersonal nature of the larger universe of links on the web is one of the key phenomena that indexing services like Google exploit to extract useful information in the face of the self-interested behavior of web site operators).

I am not totally sure what kind of information you are talking about. Are you talking about individual preferences that are aggregated by the Hayek-like price system (like in, e.g., the Googld Pagerank system) or are you talking about content that is produced by a dispersed set of people (like in, e.g., wikipedia)?

I am not sure whether the distinction is ultimately important, perhaps both categories can be translated into each other. But one difference could be that, at least under certain traditional assumptions, the creation of a preference by an individual does not depend or build upon the preferences of other individuals, whereas a wikipedia-like content production system crucially depends on building upon and changing already-existing information/content. So the kind of information that is produced in various systems could differ.