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Mark,

Birds of a feather flock together... SNA 101.

That is why we get the clusters in buying behavior and the small-
world patterns we see in much of social network data. Yes, Amazon
helps all the birds visiting their site by showing what other birds
are doing... does this "encourage" that behavior? Does the aroma in
a restaurant encourage you to eat, or would you do that anyway?

Valdis

On Jan 3, 2007, at 11:25 AM, Round Mark wrote:

> Much as I love the diagrams at OrgNet, I wonder if the sub-groups
> would be
> so clearly delineated if Amazon didn't encourage us to follow the
> behaviour
> of others. I wonder just how much of the structure could be
> predicted from
> the presence of feedback alone. Somebody must have modelled this?

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