As mentioned earlier, we’re been working on tools to track online influence — as it stands, the system monitors both the web and the blogosphere, in an attempt to balance the ‘authority’ of high-ranked web pages, with the ‘currency’ of freshly-minted blog postings, and runs analytics that track breaking news in pretty much real time. Hardcore.

From the resulting network of citations and mutual cross-referencings, a bit of graph theory can generate all sorts of interesting metrics about the centrality and reach-of-influence of particular sites in the ongoing ebb and flow of online discussion. And some pretty pictures.

All well and good.

But we’ve unearthed something interesting. What we’ve been finding, time and again, in the analysis of the patterns of influence which result, is that the blogs themselves aren’t at the centre of things — they are merely speedily responsive and orientable [in the sense of picking up a new story or meme en-masse and spreading it widely] attention-harvesters which draw people though to more authoritative traditional websites [based on the evidence that it's the 'high-centrality' websites, such as say the Wikipedia, or the BBS News site to which people actually link, rather than to the blogs whereby they've discovered those sites in the first place].

And I’m not sure why I’m surprised by that, but I am. Blogs started out as merely pointers to sites (web logs), but given the saliency and stickiness of many of the current generation, I would have expected them to take centre stage, attentionally, on many subjects. But in a graph-analysis sense, that ain’t how things play out.

Which leads to a thought about how blogs and websites work symbiotically, as part of an evolving ecosystem/organism/colony: we’ve noted before that consumer-created media is expanding the attentional surface of the web into hyperbolic forms. From our recent analysis of influence, it seems that the hyperbolic surface of the blogosphere serves a similar function for the collection and focussing of attention as the fractal surfaces of lungs and gills do for oxygen — pulling it in where it can be used. Blogs are the gills of the web. The blogosphere? A hyperbolic surface sucking attention into the traditional core of Web 1.0 where it can feed more mainstream channels.

Weird, and a bit more than an analogy. Some questions — what other emergent biomimetic processes and forms are evolving online? Does Web 2.0 function as an organism or a colony? In any case, it must be fair to say that it feeds on attention, and that we’re seeing here the evolution of an efficient way of gathering and exploiting that attention. What comes next?