I've been more reluctant lately to jump into debates circulating around the tech bloggers. Perhaps this is a fear fo repeating myself, or maybe it's a lack of a drive to be on techmeme. On Friday, however, I found myself becoming interested in the furor over Steve Rubel's entry "The Underground Blogosphere."

Steve complains about the amount of e-mails that he receives every day that essentially ask him to post a link to another blog. Many others in the techsphere got all worked up proclaiming that it is an unimportant subject. Yet what fascinated me by this idea is the operation of a parallel, low-impact network that has physical consequences in the higher-impact network of blogs. I suppose I'm a little slow on noticing this, but keep in mind that Swarming Media is merely the 188,421th most linked-to blog, compared to Rubel's 59th, so I have never received nor sent any e-mails with the intent that a link would follow.

This second network is not as explicitly traceable as the blog/link-network. It is archived in less public/searchable areas such as message histories, inboxes, and sent-items. The resulting network is, then, largely blind beyond the links from one node to another: Steve Rubel knows who sent him this mail, but I sure don't. Yet despite the separate archival/reifying system, this network has to potential to shift the explicit blog-network through the link that connects subject-node to blog-node. Fred Stutzman has a good entry further describing the interaction between these two networks:

"As the blogosphere is scale-free, the types of traffic that hubs see doesn't scale linearly (or log linearly) through the network. If Reubel receives 100 pitches in a day, it is not a safe assumption that the 1000th Technorati blog receives 98 pitches a day, and the 10,000th receives 90 (and so on, reflecting a power law based on 37MM blogs). In fact, due to Reubel's position in the network, the amount of pitch traffic he sees may be vastly disproportionate to the rest of the blogosphere."

What might be useful to add to this subject is how the political is at work. Scale-free networks, and the observation that the blog-networks operate on this model, have seemingly inherent political results. As Galloway and Thacker write in their article The Ghost in the Network:

"In network science, the "unavoidable consequence" of networks often resembles something like neoliberal democracy, but a democracy which naturally emerges according to the "power law" of decentralized networks. Like so, their fates are twisted together."

Woven into the scale-free model, then, seems to be a particular ideology and politics. Thus Rubel's posturing in his phrase, "...when I started this blog I was one of the most prolific members of the Underground Blogosphere. I sent my links to everyone. However, over a year ago I kicked this habit. Today I use it sparingly," is an explicit demonstration of his success within - and knowledge of - this scale-free ideology. Rubel finds himself the beneficiary of these politics on which he is really writing. Yet to apply this model, or even to participate in the various blogospheres is to enter into these politics and enact the ideology that these power-relations are the "natural" result of the network structure.

Perhaps then, my reluctance to jump in on these hotly-linked subjects is my reluctance to blindly subscribe to the scale-free ideology. Yet, the very fact that I've written this entry shows my complicity.