Author Archives: Cameron Marlow

Stanley Milgram’s seminal paper ‘The Small-World Problem’ (Psychology Today, 1967) tells the tale of the first social network study. Milgram had the brilliant idea to send packages to distant parts of America (Wichita, Kansas and Omaha Nebraska) with the instructions to try to move this pacakge to a target individual in Sharon, Massachusetts. The resultsContinue reading “The world just got smaller”

ok, I’m back! the conference was great, with more social networking than you can shake a bad pickup line at. in order to inspire networking, they even had a liquor-laden hospitality room open all night hoping to generate some new weak ties. I had the most excellent time I’ve ever had at a conference, thanksContinue reading “Cool city.. cool networks.. hot jazz!”

Nicholas Negroponte (co-founder of my fine institution) has been hearalding the future of 802.11 for a few years now, claiming that a grassroots movement could undermine other wireless efforts. I’ve been skeptical in the past, but I can say at the moment I’m pretty happy with the free wireless connection I’m getting from some officeContinue reading “Grassroots 802.11”

the ultimate test of any web design.. does it hold up to webTV? my first experience says NO.

ugh.. off to the airport in less than 5 hours. being a procrastinator makes life painful. i’m making a note: in the future, don’t leave things to the last minute, especially when mardi gras is at stake.

The irony is so thick, you’d think I use rogaine: overstated is on the daypop top 40, but has yet to appear on blogdex, thanks to some bugs I introduced last night. Where I come from, they call that gettin’ poked in the patoot by yer own pitchfork. Maybe someday I’ll make it onto blogdexContinue reading “Overstated on Daypop”

look ma, I grew a baby!

A bit of context for the previous post: Let’s use Dave Winer’s scripting.com as an example. By looking at the social network of scripting.com, we see that Dave has a slew of people who read him, and also that he reads a number of other weblogs. These are Dave’s “social ties,” or the individuals thatContinue reading “Social networks by example”

The traditional assessment of the dissemination of information assumes that people fall into adopter categories. These classes of innovativeness have become popular parts of our vernacular: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. My analysis of the blogdex data has shown that webloggers do fall into such neat buckets. over the course ofContinue reading “Weblogs and adopter categories”