Hemal Modi's Diary

Thought blogging was a waste of time?, not really. Now MIT Media Labs has taken weblogs as a research subject. Their new offshoot Blogdex tries to study the diffusion of information through the intricate relationships between blogs and websites. I quote their explanation below: "Ideas can have very similar properties to a disease, spreading through the population like wildfire. The goal of Blogdex is to explore what it is about information, people, and their relationships that allows for this contagious media.".
The Blogdex tool crawls through the blogs as they get updated, and lists the fastest spreading disease/idea in its front page using its own ranking algorithm(which is still evolving). It should be a good idea to enlist your blog in their directory as you would be doing service to the online community in general. So next time you make an entry into your blog and think of it as an insignificant shit in the cyber ocean, think again as Blogger aptly puts it as:
"..Not every individual post has to be a masterpiece. Does the lone bird see the cohesive beauty of the flock, but this fact remains: the whole is greater than the sum of all it's parts. As a blogger, you are both an individual force and a neuron in the giant, interconnected mind that is the blogosphere. Yes, it sounds like a bad sci-fi movie, but it's all true."

Brief History: The term 'blog' is a shorter version of the term weblog or web log.