[Sigia-l] Knowledge Unmanagement [was blogging]

[Jon Hanna]

> > Indeed someone who is particularly heavily linked-to would have
> the ability to
> > consciously manipulate this sense of consensus. As such blogs
> are generally
> > preaching to the choir (or to those who are reading precisely
> because they
> > strongly disagree) and can only subtly affect opinion.
>
> But isn't this pretty much how the world outside blogs work? When the New
> York Times publishes a story, pretty much every newspaper and TV news room
> in the U.S. takes notice of it and many cover it. I'm not sure
> the velocity
> of minority opinion dissemination via blogs is so fundamentally different
> than in other media. I think it's more 'visible' because it's more easily
> measurable.

Indeed, I said that this is how the web works. However the speed at which
blogging happens and the richness of linking relative to more conventional
sites makes the effect stronger, and more measurable as you say.

As such studying the effect within "the blogosphere" should tell us things
about how the web works that would be more difficult to measure on other
sites. The practice of recording the origin of links to the site and
(sometimes) publishing them would also aid study.