16may2002

Small worlds


Livejournal weblogs with Clay Shirky:


two connected networks can be connected in two ways:
1. knows-a: a doctor knows a lawyer
2. is-a: a doctor is also a lawyer
those are two ways of short routes across networks

livejournal is a great big interlinked thing: all blogs have knows-a friend
connections

and if you graph number of friends against frequency, then many many people have
not many friends, but a few have loads. this is a power law.

and the weblog world is devolving into a power law.

--> being able to survive power laws is a key feature of social software, says
clay

a key feature of top people is human routers: in any route across the network,
one of these top people will be involved.

now we come on to the "clustering coefficient", duncan watts. apparently an
incredible book. ah, here we go, called "small worlds":
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691005419

he's also saying that small clusters, below 12, are different from those above.
there are different types of large groups.

there's been a point recently: understanding in social software, and size of
audience, etc etc, and we've ended up with really good software.

three interesting social engineering things:
- groups. supports different user patterns for small and large groups. there's
no search engine so it feels private. and all of livejournal has disconnected
from google with robots.txt. the privacy of the mall, private in the public
space. hey, and the kids think of livejournal as different from the web.
- network friendly from the get go. really good for blogrolling. link level
link, and post level links. there are lots of interest links too, so there are
know-a and is-a link.
- there's no pretence of equality. the top 10 people are all weird. like, they
act out being desperate rappers and get an audience [who act as the friends].
but other people who just have friends. and there are others who are community
server things, news and notes about LoTR -- her friends were like human
subscriptions to the service.

livejournal have set up a system where it's fun to do all kinds of things at all
kinds of levels. and the same tools work in loads of ways.

[ah, so that's the advantage of standards. if there were lots of standards for
building weblogs that could be used in any kind of ways, then the clustering,
linking, etc stuff could all get really interesting. interesting to see the
secret properties of other kinds of systems, and what emergent properties come
out of that.]

they've got social costs in a way that prevents people from adding thousands of
friends. which is good. ie, when you go to someone's log you see all their
friend's most recent posts, something that is IMPOSSIBLE without this
centralised system. wow. and that's where the social previous against false
friends comes from.

great quote: "livejournal is good social substrate"

====

rumbling:
- interesting move to considering weblogs in the social engineering sense, as
opposed to the "what do they mean in terms of hypertext/trails/etc". they're
moved to a journalism mould from a building the world hypertext system.