Politics: Small-world Phenomena and the Dean Campaign

Politics: Small-world Phenomena and the Dean Campaign. The Dean campaign is reliant on small-world dynamics for its power.  The cross connections of egalitarian weak links of Deanie weblogs and the aristocratic Dean hub weblog serve to amplify good or positive information moving through the system.  Of course, this can cut the other way too.  Bad or negative information can be amplified out of proportion in this type of network.

My guess is that the Dean network is composed of relatively isolated clusters of nodes that rely on high throughput conduit nodes for connectivity.  If this is true, then the Dean hub and software strategy is correct.   It is using the hub weblog to pump information to the high-throughput conduit weblogs using RSS (which strengthens them).  

Of course, the Dean campaign isn't the only organization using the power of Internet enabled small-world networks.  Groups across the world are doing the same, including terrorists.  Terrorists?  Yes.  The rise of both the Internet and the first global terrorist organization (that could challenge the world's only remaining superpower) is closely linked. [John Robb's Weblog]

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