November 1, 2005
MarkBernstein.org
 

Help Me: Graph Theory

Dear hypertext theory people: are there any useful results about connectivity of random digraphs? Anything relevant from percolation theory? If you have a source -- however elementary -- I'd appreciate an email.

Explanation: I'm assembling a Fagerjordian site -- a Web site that has lots of topical pages that are linked together, from topic to topic. There's no Big Scheme and no apparatus -- the site is organic and complex, so there's not a simple site map or table of contents or grand ontology into which everything fits.

We're adding new pages every day, and I expect this to continue for some time.

Now, if you're managing a project like this, you want to be sure that every page has links from other pages, so people can find it. One heuristic for management is simply to insist on lots of links: if every page has a bunch of links to different places, then it's likely that readers will be able to move around freely.

But, how many links is 'a lot of links'? I think the answer is between 3 and 4, but I'm not certain.