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SUDDENLY, WEB COMMUNITIES have become one of the hottest topics on the wired frontier: You can see it in the rapid commercialization of the grass-roots Weblog movement, as well as the latest research into how the Web organizes itself and how Internet users connect to each other. Such research builds upon previous studies into the structure of the Web a structure that scientists have found parallels natural phenomena ranging from genetic code to our planets biosphere and beyond. Like those natural examples, the Web follows a power-law distribution meaning there are a lot of sparsely connected sites and a very small number of highly connected sites. Can the rise of small-scale communities, such as those that grow up around Weblogs, change that picture? So far, researchers say the answer is yes, no and maybe. On the no side of the issue is Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who conducted one of the first studies of the Webs connectedness and explores network theory in a new book titled "Linked. |
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Gary Flake of the NEC Research Institute has a slightly different take on the Weblog trend: I think its the next logical step, and while it is certainly changing the topology of the Web in measurable ways, I dont think that this is necessarily a paradigm shift. MAPPING THE VILLAGES Although theyre not specifically studying Weblogs, Flake and his NEC colleagues are focusing on how smaller communities develop on the Internet. However, such research requires a sophisticated Web crawler to identify the thousands or millions of global villages on the Internet. Our hope is that by the summer were actually going to be running the Web community algorithm, doing it for all possible clusterings, he said. Small-world clusters tend to have tight-knit links between a small number of users, with sparse connections to the wider network. Kevin Werbach, editor of the newsletter Release 1.0, said Weblogs could play a key role in the growth of such clusters on the Internet. There are communities that know about each other, and there are communities that dont, he said. Because theyre a tool to make information available, Weblogs lower the threshold for communities to find each other. ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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Clay Shirky, a writer and consultant who focuses on the effects of decentralizing technologies, said that the small-world trend is changing the way people use the Web, even though it may not change the overall topology. He pointed to the rise of such user-centric phenomena as Slashdot, Plastic and the hyperlinked sites known as Wikis. That has been an enormous change the notion that this stuff can now be two-way, that this can involve readers and writers as equals, he said. What this does, however, is create a world where there is a very great deal of content to be sorted through. Which gets back to Barabasis point. Shirky said he could already see the development of a power-law distribution in his studies of the LiveJournal phenomenon, as well as his own experience last month when he posted an essay on the size limitations of Web communities. Looking at the traffic that came into my site, I had links from 400 different URLs out on the Web, many of them from Weblogs, he said. The top 40 percent of that traffic came from just three Weblogs. Just as the Google search engine gained dominance by taking advantage of the Webs power-law distribution of links, experimental search engines such as Blogdex or Daypop could serve to organize the Weblog universe, Shirky said. Flake said the really interesting thing is how search engine companies and data mining companies are going to mine this information for useful things. REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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If the small-scale structures of the Web could be mapped in detail, that could open the way for subject-specific search engines say, for sports car enthusiasts or anti-terrorism sleuths. Politicians could identify the communities most likely to take their side, or oppose them, on gun control or AIDS research or Middle East policy. There could be commercial applications as well, Barabasi said. Finding the community of sports car enthusiasts would allow car companies to most effectively market their new models by placing ads at several hubs of this community, he wrote in Linked. Werbach pointed to the growing number of companies selling Web-logging software, as well as the rise of corporate Weblogs. Were not yet at the stage where Weblogs have been commercialized, but well get there. Shirky is expecting a case of dot-com deja vu all over again. What could set the Weblog phenomenon apart is that its more of a social phenomenon than a technological trend, Shirky said. If the other Webloggers dont treat you as one, and dont link to you, he said, youre going to be relegated to the long, flat plain of the power-law curve. |
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