Modeling the Social Networks of Blogland

Jon Udell continues to produce thought provoking content on the nature of weblogs and online interaction. He wrote one of the best books I've read about online collaboration back in 1999: Practical Internet Groupware

His latest piece is an attempt to map some of the links between webloggers by examining the links they have posted from their aggregators. This analysis of social clusters is still in its infancy but it has tremendous promise. Steven Johnson wrote a piece for Salon on the same topic of making social networks visible, Use the Blog, Luke

To me the visiblity of social networks is the most amazing part of the internet. I'm more inclined to be an observer of social networks before joining. Without that initial social gladhanding it's that much harder to find networks of interest. The internet makes the cost of searching for these networks much lower.