I remember going to one of my youngest brother’s soccer games, and calling it “herdball.” Every kid in the game would follow the ball around, not unlike one of those cartoon brawls that has the occasional limb sticking out of a cloud of dust. The same thing happens in kids hockey. People have this need to be a part of the herd.

It’s really easy to make fun of people for following the herd but *ooooh shiny*

Where was I? Oh yeah. This is going to be my essay on the power of word of mouth. Call it the Slashdot effect, or the Fark effect, or the [insert popular site that posts links here] effect, but what it boils down to is that if someone thinks something on the web is cool, they tell a friend, and eventually it gets around enough that someone submits it to one of the smaller “feeder” sites that then gets it posted to one or more of the larger community sites, that then results in a deluge of herdballers visiting the site, which quickly kills the server.

I’ve tried pretty hard to avoid having that happen to this site. Ok, not so hard, but at the same time, I’ve been conscious of it, and occasionally self censored in order to avoid that level of “popularity.” Yeah - that’s it.

Anyway…What’s particularly interesting is that in a way, weblogs have changed the way this herding happens. People are now free to find sites that are laser focused on their interests, and as a result, there are now large herds of people roaming the internet looking for any particular type of information you could imagine. This leads to a couple of things - first, incredible opportunity for collaboration, between people who otherwise would never have known each other existed. Second, it leads to an incredible amount of groupthink. I’ve mentioned a related issue before and I think the groupthink is responsible for my difficulties in distinguishing people from sites. There are precious few sites that I visit that regularly express differing viewpoints in a coherent way, without degenerating into namecalling and flamewars. On those sites, I still don’t make a mental note of who said what - I basically treat all people’s opinions the same way, (dis)respecting them based solely on the content of that post. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing though. What it’s done is remove reputation from the trust equation, since the views that I tend to respect are usually able to back things up with links to webpages that supposedly contain facts. Where the links go also factor into it (government site=likely valid facts, some guy’s weblog=possibly made up facts)

What a sidetrack. All that, just to mention that it strikes me as funny when I see the same story/idea in a bunch of places, even though it’s basically something that I’ve been doing myself for a couple of years on and off without thinking that it’s particularly remarkable. That article mentions a slight tweaking on the technique that I’ve been using for missed episodes of shows that I want to watch, but like I said, I didn’t think I was doing anything particularly newsworthy at the time…Meanwhile I’ve seen that same story linked on no less than 5 different major sites within the last two days.

Who said I can’t be longwinded? Oh, that’s right, nobody ever said that.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Uh no, he’s been walking around like that since Thanksgiving.” - Akira(?)