[Warning: Long and possibly overly techie at the end] On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 12:51:22AM +0100, Simon Wistow wrote: > > I've been working on this http://thegestalt.org/simon/remove this bit > between these two slashes/gestalt/ > > The basic idea is to try and map the topology of the London > nu-media-and-related-industries community. > > Anyway, one of the (non enforced) rules is that you don't link from > yourself to another person unless you play the 'bodily fluid' get out > rule - if you're blood relatives or seeing somebody. Instead you link > through other entities such as houses, workplaces, universities and > online cabals (such as, err, this mailing list). The reasoning behind > this is that I thought that it would be more scaleable - if I had a link > to all my friends and all my friends had a link to all my other friends > then it could get very messy, very quickly. > > However a friend of mine argued that having everyone you knew listed > explicitly would be better since you met everybody you know from a > situation and so its only going to create extra links by linking through > the situation as a third party. > > Does that make sense (in a purely semantic sense)?
You already know that I think the hierarchical system is a better approach. Not least because the linkages which are possible have some kind of semantic meaning. Eg, it is meaningless to say that a place attends another place, or an online cabal dated a university. This provides an incredibly large amount of constraint on the system and will make it easier to analyse. Ben's First Obvious-to-me Claim: (1) In a sufficiently large, close community [s/close/(insular|incestuous|insectoid)/] the %age of person-person links which do *not* share any links via a third (non-person?) entity is zero. The interesting thing is what 'large' and 'close' mean here. My guess is 'bloody small' and 'actually quite sparse'. Ben's Second Obvious-to-me Claim: (2) The optimal size of an online cabal is an inverse power-law of the download size of the cabal (in some suitable units). The thing which interests me is that, if (2) is true (for some vaguely interesting groups), can we calculate the power involved (the critical exponent). If all of that is true, then whether a cabal has a maximal size or not depends on the value of the exponent. If it's > 1, then it does, but it might be hugely large. If it's > 2, then the cabal probably won't ever be found in the wild at a size very far from its maximal size. [If people want to see my reasoning, then asking me offline might be a good idea. Some keywords: "Universality", "scaling", "Kenneth Wilson", "criticality"] [De jargonised version of (2): The more traffic there is on a group, the more people will drop out. Under certain circumstances - probably most circumstances - we can find out how many people are likely to drop out at certain traffic rates. There might well be a maximum effective size for online groups, which we could determine by measuring things. The downside is, in practice, online groups which have been around for a while might always *be* at their optimal size] Ben
