Archive for the 'Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science' Category



overstated: Weblogs and authority

In the Overstated weblog (great name, by the way), Cameron Marlow suggests that blogrolls are proxies for popularity while links directly from a blog post to a permalink of another blog are proxies for influence. For example, slashdot is popular in blogrolls but Joi Ito is popular to link to in posts. Marlow does […]

Jeremy Wagstaff’s LOOSE wire: Blogs And The Suppression Of Dissent

Jeremy Wagstaff, after giving a fairly in-depth summary of my informational cascades article, responds with the following counterpoint:
On the other hand, there’s also plenty of evidence to suggest blogs foster a healthy discussion and if someone says something controversial, it’s likely to be challenged. It’s not always easy to see your words criticised on the […]

Weblog Audience-Building and the Strength of Weak Ties

One of the challenges you face when you start a new weblog is attracting an audience. Who is going to gather the pearls of wisdom that you offer to the world? It’s not that hard these days to find somebody you know who already has a weblog and would be willing to link to you; […]

Weblogs Can Harm Business and Political Decision-Making

Looks like I’m almost famous. Yahoo! Financial News picked up the press release from my eLearn article (with a title that’s even more sensational than the one we picked for the front-page column, I might add).

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmfeldstein.com%2Fweblogs_can_harm_business_and_political_decision_making%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Weblogs+Can+Harm+Business+and+Political+Decision-Making’;
addthis_pub = ‘’;

Correction on the Origins of Informational Cascade Research

I was mistaken in an earlier post when I claimed that informational cascades research comes from the “heuristics and biases approach” in psychology. It definitely comes from behavioral economics.
Both behavioral economics and the heuristics and biases approach share common ancestry from the work of Herbert Simon. A genuine polymath, Simon won a Nobel Prize in […]





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