heh. just posted and read this. I saw the mob spot thing this morning, and it was what linked me to the post I just made. I think that Dean probably wants these 'mob spots' in a big way, and who can blame him. I think the point that johnson makes that is so interesting deals with the effectiveness of these spots correlating to their stickiness. he referenced this idea in his second update, when he asked if the iraq bombing of the U.N. is too politically explosive. Sure these spots may be easy to design, but in order to spread, they need to stick. What comes to mind is the research I've been doing on contagious media - check out http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~peretti/

"Contagious media" is a nice buzzword, and don't get me wrong, it's worth studying from an "academic" perspective, but honestly, I think that the real world (see: blogs) have the spreading and sticking thing more than figured out. See just about any recent Internet meme (or search Google) for reference.

For comparison: how many page views just about anything linked into the Technorati, blo.gs, or other blogging ecosystem pages get, vs Peretti's sites (or hey, how about this page).

yes and no, I think. yeah, blogs have more links to them, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this kind of stuff is really proliferating outside of certain domains. I'd be interested to see if you knew of any stats about the redundency of sites in these networks all linking to eachother. my friends who are not bloggers don't get this stuff, they see stuff that is floating around joe user's dorm room, which in my experience is more like stuff that peretti is doing, and less like a typical blog. the interesting thing to me is trying to come up with atypical blogs that are able to spread throughout a larger network diameter. and in that sense, I think we are talking more about local vs. global infection. Although I suspect you will disagree with that.

reading my last post, I realize that blogs do accomplish the repetition aspect of stickiness very well. Just as an example, I visited three blogs today - johnson's, joi's, and this one, and all three of them had a post on mob spots. but I still don't think that this kind of stuff is snowballing and reaching out to quote unquote the masses. maybe I'm wrong, and google may 'prove' as much. I just don't feel that many blogs generate the same type of cultural buzz that a lot of these satire / joke sites have been generating. I mean, if I ask my web-unfriendly friend about all your base are belong to us or realultimatepower, and then ask him about the new post on boingboing. And checking technocrati isn't a valid comparison. bloggers link more, and they read more blog sites. Bloggers therefore link to more blog sites. Ok, that is some dubious logic, normally, but in this case may provide some insight into why news and blog sites rank higher. The rich get richer. none of this is to say that blogging isn't a social or cultural force, but I think it's an interesting discussion.

Hmm, I'm not going to say that blogs are _the_ overwhelming force, but take a look at AYBBTU, or almost any of the recent 'big things' in the past couple of years: Friendster, Flash Mobs, err, Star Wars Kid...

While blogs may not necessarily be at absolute start, they are the grease that gets stuff to the tipping point before it makes it into mass circulation. Almost every single internet meme I've seen hits the blogs before I ever see them (usually months later) hit the mainstream. Why? Blogs are indexed, both by Google (check out the PageRank scores on your next visit) and a variety of blog crawling engines. On the human side, many journalists, pundits, etc now either maintain blogs or use them in picking up/researching stories.

The 'archival' or 'dirty snowball' effect is probably the biggest advantage that blogs have over emails. Emails and IMs come and go, but URLs are forever (or something cliche like that), allowing ephermerids to get to a critical mass.