A couple of years ago one of my themes (limited by tools) was to cross-link citations, to see who cited who positively or negatively. ie forget the content for a moment, look at the meta-data. I noticed John Udell is focussing on meta-data in business e-mail-based communications, and via this other infoworld blog, followed the link to Valdis Krebs’ Orgnet.
John picks up on the polarisation (binary) effect created – but Krebs thesis is more general – Intra-community linking is rich, Inter-community linking is sparse. The inter-community linkers he charcterises as “The New Pioneers”, after Tom Petzinger’s book on management theories. Krebs started with analysis of “purchasing” habits, but extended it to memes – which is still “buying” of course ..
“I’ll buy that” = “That sounds like sense to me”
or conversely
“I don’t buy that” = “That’s nonsense IMHO”.
Those people looking for common messages in the old and new and other competing schools of though. Pretty close to my nothing new under the sun thread – provide you’re looking at essential messages. I guess that makes me a (would-be) New Pioneer.
Valdis title “The Social Life of Books” is the same play as Sealy-Brown and Duguid’s “Social Life of Information” (2000), surely alluding to (but not citing) Minsky’s “Society of Mind” (1998) – nothing new under the sun metaphorically, and is itself five years old (1999). The invention is not the point – the common ground is.
If this is what people are meaning by social networks, then count me in. Common sense – sense shared between various factions. Common sense, I’ve already bought it. Must actually read it.