Take a quick look for a quantitative way to measure the marketplace of ideas:
Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
Posted by donturn at February 11, 2003 05:21 PMHere is an interesting debunking of the piece that suggests the data Shirky was using was based on the browsing habits of a single reader, who was heavily biased toward right-wing "Warblogs."
Warning flags went up for me when he says "Because it arises naturally," since presenting something as "natural" is a common rhetorical strategy that allows writers to suggest the behavior of an existing system is the only one possible, squeezing out room for critique.
The representation of weblogs as a power law distribution made me curious about how building a statistical model to forecast a power-law phenomenon...I haven't really come across any definitive answers, but I did come across an interesting synopsis on random graphs...... http://math.ucsd.edu/~llu/reference/
The Kumar article it references is about graphing knowledge-bases on the web. Though the focus is statistical, I think there are some good points about the structure of networks.... http://dev.acm.org/sigmod/disc/p_extractinglargesprs.htm
Off the subject - I can't seem to insert a hyperlink in comments. I tried the help file, but the only info I could find was for entries and didn't work when I tried it. Any insight?