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blog beehavior
(Sunday 9th February 2003)

Mark talks about Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality.
... freedom of choice, tempered by the part of human nature that makes people ever-so-slightly more likely to choose what people before them have chosen.

Well there's a very nice analogue of how this works in Kevin Kelly's book Out Of Control, where he describes how the 'hivemind' (a hive of bees) find a new location for their hive:

It's a rare bee, except for the scouts, who has inspected more than one site. The bees see a message, "Go there, it's a nice place." They go and return to dance/say, "Yeah, it's really nice." By compounding emphasis, the favorite sites get more visitors, thus increasing further visitors. As per the law of increasing returns, them that has get more votes, the have-nots get less. Gradually, one large, snowballing finale will dominate the dance-off. The biggest crowd wins.

It's an election hall of idiots, for idiots, and by idiots, and it works marvelously. This is the true nature of democracy and of all distributed governance.

Well I'm not so sure if this positve 'and it works marvelously' is to be applied to blogging and human beehavior so much, but that's how it also works here.

Jonathon has some good thoughts about this, and what it means for us non-A-list-and-also-not-dinner-conversation bloggers...

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Martin Spernau
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