How connected are you?

The world wide web. Social networks. Links. Making connections. Creating communities. The internet.

All these words and phrases evoke images of a spider’s web, a network of connections, chains, groups of people, fishing nets - so many things that bind us all together.

One of the powerful currencies of social media is links - because links help you move up the searchability ranks and also up the rank of authority. It comes from the early origins of the internet which began in the world of academia. Academic texts that are referred to by other academic writers gain the reputation of being authorities on that particular subject. The more a particular text is cited, the greater the authority. So, for example, in the world of psychology, textbooks invariably cite Freud - but they are not so likely to cite an unknown student’s dissertation. Freud is an authority - and is likely to stay one - while that unknown student is not unless he/ she gets their dissertation noticed and cited by other academics. And cited a lot.

So with blogs and websites and other online content: the more other sites link to your blog, the greater your blog is considered an authority. Technorati is a website that calculates your blog’s ranking in the world of blogs so you can see how you compare with the top blogs like Endgadget (No. 1) and Boing Boing (No. 2) - they are the blogs that are linked to the most.

There’s a delightful application called TouchGraph that helps you visualise the network of communities and connections that you are in. Here is a screen shot of the connectivity for my arts and writing blog, Fusion View (No. 69,776* on Technorati).

(Click on the picture for a more detailed view)

To check out how connected you are, go to TouchGraph and type in your blog’s URL and it will generate a swirling, moving net of all the other blogs and websites you are linked with. It’s wonderfully hypnotic, reminding me of the adage that no-one is more than six people away from anyone else (”the six degrees of separation”).

And if you haven’t already done so, sign up at Technorati and “claim your blog”.

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*It seems that breaking through the top 100,000 Technorati ranking barrier is a big deal on the blogosphere, as testified by some of the blog posts that celebrate that breakthrough. So, I guess I need to do something like throw my mouse in the air and douse my computer with champagne or something…!