I’m in the process of considering what I’ll write my next essay on, what will be the incisive thesis question. I’ve done some work on Twitter and why this (and by extension other micr-blogging platforms) are so important, especially to students in Australia, where the penetration of Twitter appears to be much less than in the US and Japan.
I’m reading a piece from Joichi Ito who comments on the Clay Shirky’s Power Laws saying that the top ranking blogs may end up being mass media sites and almost impossible to topple from the number one spot. But he also points out that blogs tend to form scale-free networks, with some blogs actings as both nodes and hubs thus linking networks together. I’ve seen this discussed somewhere else before and it made some sense in that, people tend to act as connectors to their own group of friends and sometimes become the connectors between groups of friends. It helps to explain why some blogs become immensely popular among groups of like-minded people and are linked to regularly (the hubs).
Not sure if this has helped me work out what my thesis statement question is going to be, but at least I’ve written something.
