[wordup] Blogspace Under the Microscope

[Adam Shand]

This is fascinating.  The convergence of content is becoming a pet
interest of mine, in some ways it's what I'm most grateful to Personal
Telco for ... the introduction to wiki.

Adam.

Via: http://www.drop.org/node.php?id=868#comment
From: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/webservices/2002/05/03/udell.html

Blogspace Under the Microscope
by Jon Udell
05/03/2002

The culture of blogspace is evolving in near-realtime. Last week, a new
mutation brought backlinks into a more prominent role. At Disenchanted,
inbound links were automatically reflected outward. Each article grew a
tail of backlinks that pointed to pages referring back to it. Suddenly a
new kind of feedback loop was created. With a twist of the lens,
conversations that had been diffuse and indirect came sharply into
focus. Almost immediately the meme replicated.

Variants appeared at DECAFBAD and diveintomark. It's hard to avoid the
sense that there's some biological force at work here. When blogspace
told me to follow that hunch, I listened.

Sam Ruby, in an essay called Neurotransmitters, mentioned Steve
Burbeck's The Tao of e-business services. "Read the The Touchstone of
Life by Werner Loewenstein," said Steve. So I did. Loewenstein argues
that the flow of information, more than the flow of energy, is the
engine of life. There are many interrelated and circular information
flows, or loops, of three main types:

    * Biomolecular loops, where the template on which products are
assembled is, in turn, synthesized by those products.

    * Intracellular loops, which recapitulate this theme in the realm of
protein synthesis.

    * Intercellular loops, where hormonal or electrical signals form
large-scale networks.

At all levels, energy -- lots of it -- is traded for information. So we
shouldn't be surprised to see bloggers roust links from their hiding
places in referrer logs and use them to create new information loops.
The principle of information economy dictates that what was acquired at
such great cost will be conserved and reused wherever possible.

More than economy is at work here, though. Offering backlinks is a
strategy that furthers the ambition of every blogger to engage other
minds. It does so by enlarging the surface area and altering the shape
of the posted article, which is the unit of information currency in
blogspace.

Both techniques can help provoke the desired engagement which, like a
biomolecular reaction, is a hard-won outcome that needs all the
catalytic help it can get. The attractive force that binds molecules to
substrates is weak, and easily overcome by their incessant jostling. To
be effective, writes Loewenstein, "their molecular surfaces must be
large, and their shapes must match within a few angstroms."

In blogspace, a backlink tail increases surface area in ways that
attract the wandering eye of the reader and the probing tentacle of
Google. It alters the shape in a more abstract sense. An article that
has manifestly drawn the attention of people I know has, for me,
something like the molecular specificity that drives biological
reactions.

Backlinks also supply context. In cellular as in language-based
communication, messages carry only part of the information exchanged. "A
minimal signal," writes Loewenstein, "elicits a large response in a
prepared system, one that contains practically all the information that
gets into play." A key aspect of such preparation is the assembly and
display of context. What was formerly available mainly to writers, for
whom the perusal of referrer logs became an obsession, is now reflected
back to readers as well.

The information loops formed by these backlink tails are small and
simple. They express relatedness very differently than Google's "similar
pages" function. That large-scale information loop, made visible by a
new species of API-enabled Google explorers, may already have run its
course. Evolution, says Loewenstein, favors simple loops over complex
ones:

The number of loops, their interconnections, and attendant adapter
molecules have proliferated immensely ... but the basic feedback loops
... have remained simple. Evidently, evolutionary advance here was made
by multiplication of loops .… The simplest self-reproducing loop ... is
the winner. Although it may contain less information, the basic loop
with few members is evolutionarily more agile than any loop with more.

The information trails written in backlinks are, of course, new grist
for Google's mill. They also enable an emerging breed of software, the
social network analyzer, to visualize patterns of group formation.

The fact that groups are not readily identifiable seems at odds with the
notion that blogging is a collaborative effort. In forums and
newsgroups, well-defined groups interact directly in shared spaces. In
blogspace, individuals control autonomous spaces. Groups are fluid
coalitions. Interaction happens in more indirect ways. These are hard
rules to play by. And that is why life took so long to achieve
multicellularity. Writes Loewenstein:
It took some two and a half billion years to get from the first cells to
the first multicellular organisms, about twice as long as to get from
the first multicellular organisms to us. Evidently the toughest part was
to get those solipsistic cellular beings to cooperate. After the first
cooperative successes, the millions of organisms followed like an
avalanche.

Breaching the cell membrane required complex and delicate engineering.
No single strategy sufficed. Like computer networks, multicellular
organisms use both broadcast and point-to-point communication. Hormones
are broadcasts. Intercellular channels are nailed-up connections.

Blogspace has its analogs in RSS, which broadcasts messages far and
wide, and hyperlinks, which fold space to make distant sites neighbors.
The new backlinking style deepens these folds but, biology suggests,
cannot proceed without limit.

The aperture of an intercellular channel, Loewenstein says, has an
optimal size. At 16-18 angstroms, it's wide enough to pass all but the
largest molecules -- proteins, DNA, and RNA. Thus evolution arranges for
the maximum exchange of information that does not threaten the genetic
individuality of the cell. If these pores were any wider, "the RNAs and
proteins would go through, which would mean the kiss of death for
cellular information selfhood."

I said in an earlier column that blogspace is a laboratory for
group-forming experiments. As we conduct and observe those experiments,
it seems useful to reflect on how life itself uses information loops to
sustain multicellular collaboration.

The analogies are compelling -- though also, let's admit, fashionable
and subject to abuse. Happily, biologists and information scientists are
now talking to one another more and more. Having that conversation in
blogspace might be a good way to get to the root of what blogspace is
becoming, and how, and why.

Jon Udell is an independent consultant and the author of "Practical
Internet Groupware" published by O'Reilly & Associates.