By way of new scientist magazine....
This post offers an attempt to study the behaviour of the connected at the university of Indiana at Bloomington. The article extract is picked up ...
Mark Meiss and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington collected statistical data on hundreds of millions of online connections involving people exchanging emails, sharing files or just browsing the web. They found extreme variations in user behaviour - for example, in the number of people a user tended to interact with. The spread of results was utterly unlike the normal bell curve of statistics, produced when most data points are clustered around a central value, with few points at the "tails" of the curve.
I recommend that you follow the links and download the full report. What I find fascinating is the variance in the statistical outputs and what ramifications this holds for those who want to define what the next big thing is for WEB 2.0 and the Internet at large.
For instance, can we draw from some of this data that people's connectedness is now not based on introduction so much, but by way of thinking and learning? Could it be that individuals have become more needing of connecting with people who desire to learn about the same things that they want to learn about? Is this really social networking or do we connect on an intellectual level first? I am beginning to think that "connecting" in the on-line world has social outcomes but other than dating web sites, the drivers of on-line behaviour are something more tangible.
I will watch this space with interest.....
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