“There is definitely something in the air,about networks,” John Clippinger said to me when we ran into each other at Albert Laszlo Barabasi’s talk at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Colloquium on Social Networks and Complexity. Barabasi’s talk on the architecture of networks makes the very clear case that there are underlying laws of physics that apply to the topology and growth of networks. Despite all the mathematics (which I neither pretend nor aspire to understand), it was great fun, and good reinforcement for my learning. He’s also a very witty speaker! Barabasi’s book, Linked: The New Science of Networks, brings all the research in microbiology, physics, sociology, economics and the internet and WWW together. He and his associates have proved that the world wide web has a diameter of 19 degrees, and in the process of studying it came to understand a number of other “laws” of networks, including “the rich get richer.”

This makes sense certainly in the world of blogs, eh? The first blogs were linked to by the new blogs that came along, and continue to be linked to, so that they continue to become more and more central to the entire network of blogs. Peripheral folks have a chance, but they need to work hard to get those links!

John Clippinger, btw, edited the great book, The Biology of Business , a great collection of articles about complex adaptive systems theory and how the theories are applied in business. John’s latest venture is a company called Parity, which tracks email in a company and identifies the type of email and keeps records of commitments, promises, questions asked and answered, and so on. The email trail can also be used to develop network maps….