How-to Dean
: John Robb is thinking aloud (I love it when bloggers do that) in two posts (so far) about what Dean has done right, setting up a network with a hub and spokes that allow the whole to operate without apparent authoritarianism but also without anarchy. What’s he’s writing about is not true of weblogs in general — which are individual and anarchistic, forming ad hoc and bottoms-up networks. He’s writing about using weblogs and networks to meet a goal of the whole:
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, not only the Dean campaign is 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.
