Casting Small Webs

Backfence, the local citizen journalism site, just went down. (By the way how do you hyperlink to a defunct website?) In lieu of a hyperlink to nowhere, here's a link to an article for those unfamiliar with Backfence.

This was one of the more successful citizen journalism site in the US. And of course I have a theory to why it failed.

People climb Mt. Everest because they can. However journalism should serves a purpose. Backfence created local news website because they could and because they were greedy.

Greedy? How so, they were focusing on grassroots journalism not the largest common denominator? Or were they?

They casted a wide net in a local community and caught few people. They wanted to cover everything that happened and that is simply not interesting. Networks, according to A.L. Barabasi the leading physicist working on complex network theory, don't follow a merely random pattern, which is the bell curve.

Networks have large hubs that attract nodes for some reason following a power law distribution. (Do a web search on the book "Linked" by this guy trying to get a single appropriate link is too difficult.)

Backfence either ignored network theory in to their business or failed to apply the theory. In my humble opinion that's like ignoring the law of gravity when trying to build a plane.

Simply put the failure of Backfence was casting a web so large everything fell between the fabric. Small but tight webs placed in strategic locations adheres more closely to the way networks truly function.

I believe Local Education News would follow the natural laws of network. While this project may or may not succeed the structure that it follows will probably be the way news and information will be organized in the future. The rhizomatic structure described by Giles Deleuze also fits with modern network theory.