Cyber Serendipity
by Paul Miller
The first thing to note is that any site on the web is, on average, only 19 clicks from any other site. This little quirk of network theory means that one of the best ways to find interesting things is just follow links and then follow them some more. The BBC news site, for instance, has a little section of �external links� on the right hand side of all the stories with links to any sites or organisations that are mentioned � if you follow these links for a while you�re bound to find something you didn�t set out thinking you�d find.
The �small world� nature of the web is due to highly connected �hubs� that enable you to click through to a huge number of sites. The ultimate site for this is, of course, Google. It�s really worth learning how to Google properly and playing with all the features on the site. You can brush up on the basics here or pick up a few more things here but also check out Google Labs for things that they haven�t put on the main site yet. Google Sets is particularly funky - try putting in �Demos�, �Fabian Society� and �IPPR� and see what you get.
But there are other hubs. One of my favourites is Arts & Letters Daily. There�s also SciTech Daily (if you�re that way inclined). The joy of these is that somebody else goes out to find out what�s interesting each day and points you in a direction that you might not have thought of before. Each site has a long list of �permanent� links to the front pages of other sites in the left hand column.
If you�ve got other tips, post them in the comments section.
John Manoochehri
Two things flowing from the above (in true net style, not directly related to Paul's point):
Firstly, the infrastructure behind the 19-clicks world (i.e. the hardwiring of the internet) is very interesting and rather worrying. As the article Paul points to indicates, random failure of the nodes in the internet does not generally lead to significant loss of interconnectivity, which is part of the reason for developing packet-switched networks in the first place. But the failure of a hub does lead to some serious connectivity problems. I find it interesting that one issue that has not yet arisen in mainstream pro/anti-globalisation debates is who owns the main internet/telecoms backbones. Believe it not, there are - I think - less than 10 core trans-atlantic internet/comms backbones (I think it's about five - I looked something up here, but I had heard it already), each carrying an inconceivable amount of voice and data traffic through fibre optics; and comparatively not difficult to disrupt maliciously. This is not to mention who actually owns them. I'm very surprised that this has not vexed anti-globalisers as much as, say, Echelon (global structure infrastructure, US-UK (-Aus?) stuff). And then that leads to the question of who manages the internet. Utterly fascinating, and again, not easy to get into. Try unpicking the interrelations among IANA, ICANN, IAB, IETF, ISOC, W3C - which are the core internet players. I will be writing up an essay on my website about this soon. And try working out who has the upper hand - companies, governments, or the super-geeks who have designed the protocols? (It's one of the most encouraging things about the world, not just the web, that it's the super-geeks who have stitched it up for the time being, it seems.)
Have a look at these gorgeous graphics to show the web and its hubs and nodes fit together (lots more of this type of visualisation on the web, some in virtual reality/3D format).
Secondly, don't forget the ethical news 'hubs'
http://www.zmag.org
http://www.oneworld.net
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