(2002-05-22) c

Alan Boyle on people applying SmallWorld thinking to the BlogWeb. Clay Shirky, Gary Flake, Power Law, etc. Although they're not specifically studying Weblogs, Flake and his NEC colleagues are focusing on how smaller communities develop on the Internet. However, such research requires a sophisticated Web crawler to identify the thousands or millions of global villages on the Internet. "Our hope is that by the summer we're actually going to be running the Web community algorithm, doing it for all possible clusterings," he said.