Rates of Change for Degrees of Seperation between web logs. Small World Item 3 According to a simple calculstion my blog is now 2.6 degrees seperated from anyone's blog. I found the the equation in the third chapter of Linked Then I got the numbers from SecondP0st Blogging Ecosystem
d=Log(N)/Log(k) where k is the average number links per page and N is the total number of Nodes in the study. Further the amount or stock of Social Capital contained in the network is inversely proportional to the degrees of seperation. More here later.
If you go in reverse and let k be the average number of links to dave then he is 1.3 degrees seperated us friends.
The people or social network is about 6 degrees seperated from Kevin Bacon, Any single web page in general is 19 degrees seperated from any other web page (based on year 2000 numbers with 1 billion pages and 7 links per page the actual calulation was based on selected subsets and then statistically extrapolated to the web in general). Weblogs are displaying lower seperation numbers than people networks.
With the Horizons of Observability being limited to 2 degrees if your degrees of seperation is less than your horizon of observability you can be very well informed about what the others in your world are working on even if you haven't talked directly with them lately. Basicly the cost of maintaing useful network connectivity has been reduced lower than the horizons of observability. This is a very good condition.
The think that makes weblogs significant is that the average number of links per page is both high and contains context. That means that even if I have 28 links per page view many of them contain way-finding cues that make it more likely for you to select the correct one amoungst equally likely options.
Maybe adding this calculation to the blogging ecosystem report each day and watching it for changes as a indicator of the flow. The calculation does normalize the numbers taking into account for the change in the N as the number of nodes increases or maybe decreases.
5:53:34 AM 
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