Thursday, June 03, 2004

Spores

Can we fight back against the spread of the idea? Can the condition of the idea be improved?

Blogdex is a research project of the MIT Media Laboratory tracking the diffusion of information through the weblog community. Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media.

However, it seems that Blogdex does not account for the spontaneous generation of ideas in multiple locations. Similar environments will often naturally breed similar ideas, or diseases, without having contact with each other.

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