Social networks guru Valdis Krebs has written an analysis which purports to show that creating a single intelligence czar is less efficient in terms of getting intelligence to the President than leaving the stove pipes but adding connections among them.
Maybe.
But Krebs leaves out at least two critical externalities. First, his proposed solution requires that no [...]
Gilad Ravid and Sheizaf Rafaeli’s new piece in FirstMonday, “Asynchronous Discussion Groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks“, analyzes a voluntary learning community that develops on a university’s LMS. These are all students who are (apparently) registered for on-campus web-enhanced courses with strictly voluntary web-enhanced components. Interestingly, the study analyzed networking for the entire [...]
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 [...]
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; [...]
Stephen Downes’ mention of my article on informational cascades (thanks for the plug, Stephen) led me to his post in the trdev discussion group. He writes:
In network theory, ‘groupthink’ is an instance of what is known as a cascade phenomenon. A cascade occurs (all other things being equal) when the propogation of a property (an [...]
