Blogosphere emergence

Anyone who attended our “emergence” panel at the IPDI last week might enjoy this video.

Success depends on: do all the traps have similar triggers? are all traps set? are all close enough to each other? And, for self-perpetuation, how quickly are they reset after being sprung? Others? (For emergence geeks: lots more tangents in “Six degrees” by Duncan Watts.)

At IPDI, Peter Daou, Mike Krempasky and John Aravosis and I brainstormed about what makes a blog hurricane happen and whether one can be seeded. Peter and I agree that higher order behaviors are emerging as the blogosphere grows in size and connectedness; John and Mike were more skeptical, though they agree that hurricanes do happen. (It’s the attribution of quasi animal spirits to the blogosphere that puts them off, I guess.) We all agreed, at least, that blog hurricane forecasting is still in the 1920s at best. (Mike forwards a journalist’s take on the panel. )