The whole point of looking for order in the underlying mechanics in the first place, was to try to understand the phenomenon better. For example, Bernardo Huberman points out that systems that demonstrate power law distributions also often display 'small worlds' behavior, aka 'six-degrees-of-separtion' (after a famous sociology experiment conducted at Harvard in the 60s).

Huberman and some grad students, working with Google's server logs, showed that, on average any 2 Web sites are 4 links apart, and any 2 Web pages are 19 links apart. Weblogs are likely at least that close (if you look over all Z million of them), and the tightly-knit communities are likely only a link apart (think blogrolls). So blogs may deviate from the expected norm in some cases. What can we learn from that?

I think it's interesting that Kotke quoted Steven Johnson on 'screw or embrace' the power law nature of Weblogs. One of Johnson's contributions to the literature is 'Emergence', his book about how, in realms from ant hills to networks to cities, complex behavior emerges from relatively simple underlying principles, wihtout any sort of central management.

I think we see this in the blog world daily: an idea is born, developed and put to work in hours, without a fixed set of uber-editors. I think you saw this after the Columbia disaster, when the foam-strikes-tile theory rapidly emerged within about an hour of the event. I think this is important, and is a good reason why professional news-gathering organizations should be looking rather more seriously at blogs.

Huberman's book was published early in 2002, NEC's study was published in April, 2002, but in the 2 months since this lowly post, a whole body of blog-focused scholarship has arisen. Theories have been tested and vetted and some interesting strategies for publishing and technologies for monitoring Weblogs have been proposed.

And this body of knowledge emerged, quickly, without grant writers or editorial direction. The Network Effect works its magic... stuff we couldn't imagine when the Net was hooked up...
Comments 4:26:53 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures