 Sunday, June 02, 2002
More on Social Networks
"I cleaned up blogrollfinder.py a bit and ran it again, this time just looking one level deep: sites that are listed on blogrolls of people who are on my blogroll. This answers the question, Who are the people that you're reading reading that you're not reading? The answer is enlightening:
There is an incredibly strong contingent of library-related weblogs that I am apparently related to by blogroll and didn't even know it. My mother would be proud; she was a librarian for many years. Guess it's in my blood.
Update: On further inspection, it seems there was a bug in the script which counted everything on Jenny Levine's blogroll twice. Still, it is interesting that she acts as a sort of window into a new, tightly interlinked community. Dedicated readers may recall that Google originally recommended her to me through a list of 'related' links. Wild." [dive into mark]
This is just one of many interesting experiments Mark has been posting during the last 24 hours, so be sure to check out the rest. RSS fever has been infecting many a great post this weekend!
Let's Forget the Whole 'Blog thing - I Just Want My NAGG
"...I realize that I'm now addicted to my News Aggregator (which I call my 'NAGG'). Even if I decided never to post another blog entry I would never give up my NAGG. I am subscribed to 88 news sources currently, and let me tell you brother it's not enough. From the mundane to the sublime. I get NFL news, and news on the Saints -- so I always know about their trades and acquisitions (and I know before I get home and watch the local sports on TV). I get a pretty good selection of offbeat news and what I miss (which is a lot), other bloggers seem to catch pretty well (Boing Boing is a great resource for this and other things). And of course, I get a lot of legal news. But the amazing thing is how little I now rely on traditional news sources for breaking news.
It's really funny now when people ask me 'say did you hear that...' And I say 'yeah, I blogged about that two days ago.' The other day I had another small epiphany. I followed the Ken Layne pointer to a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh and posted a short thing about the FBI's mishandling of intelligence information before 9/11. I thought it was strange that an article from the New Yorker was available online, but I was in a hurry to post and get back to something else. Two days later I was in my friend Greg's office and he had a copy of the New Yorker sitting on his desk. I asked if it was the latest copy and he said it was so I picked it up and looked to see if the Hersh article was in there (it was, which surprised me a little bit because I didn't think that the New Yorker would post such fresh content online). I mentioned to him that the Hersh article was a good read, thinking it was ironic that usually he sends me his New Yorkers after he is done with them, with yellow post it notes marking the worthy articles, and here I am (a non-subscriber) telling him what is worth reading in his freshly delivered copy. As I was leaving he asked if I how I knew about the article, and I said....well you know what I said." [Ernie the Attorney]
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