May 8, 2002
MarkBernstein.org
 

Weblog alife

I'm looking forward to teaching a tutorial on hypertextuality of weblogs with Jill Walker this June at Hypertext 2002. I'm learning a lot about weblogs from Tinderbox, and Radio, and from observation. And Jill, of course, is a true weblog artist.

There's still a lot nobody really knows about weblogs. How do you get, and keep, a great audience? Does the future hold a million small weblogs, or two really big ones?

I'm hoping to learn about weblogs from an alife simulator I'm building. In the simulated world, we have 600 little artificial writers (I call them weblets) with 600 artificial weblogs. If traffic is the currency of the Web, each of the weblets wants to get rich. Some have big blogrolls (so lots of people will think well of them). Some have lots of daily links (so they can reward their friends quickly). Some hoard traffic, some spread it around. We'll see who wins.