Vaporous Thoughts

The term blogosphere also alludes to atmosphere. Let's see how far the metaphor will spread.

Whilst websites are like nodes in a network − destination points like airports that are of weightier substance than the routes flown between them − blogs really are more like molecules in a gas. In a sense they are implictly members of a higher-level system from the moment they come into being.

Unlike scientists studying gas molecules it's actually quite easy for us to isolate and analyse the properties of the individual components of our blogosphere: with tools like Technorati, Google Blogsearch and Blogpulse we can zoom straight in to the smallest components and those that are 'nearest' to them according to a given set of criteria.

But the atmospheric scientists have the edge over us when it comes to detecting and describing the higher-level regularities. (In many cases they don't need sophisticated hardware, they can just see them.)

Our blog molecules may have more individual personality, but their aggregate behaviour is much harder to specify with certainty. Sometimes when the patterns are small enough we might just get lucky with simple queries as it's never that hard to reassemble quality from a small enough set of quantities.

But reassembling truly higher-level order from many thousands of blogs would be akin to re-mapping an entire rain forest ecosystem from all the different biological bits. When you start from the bottom up you have no guarantee that you will follow all the links in the right order. (Yet I'm still optimistic that we might be able to fudge it without having to resort to complex mathematical models − that's where my contributions would end!)

As I pointed out in the previous post, we can't be certain that the properties that make the blogosphere (and the social media in general) so interesting to marketing technologists represent the average behaviour of the whole. But hypercycles, those intensely sociable, amplifying networks of meaning within the blogosphere may be having an impact that belies their relative predominance in the mix.