I don’t remember much from this week’s symposium, and my 3 lines of notes haven’t been much help in jogging my memory. I do however remember a discussion of blogs as ecologies, though I’m unsure of how much detail it was covered in. Here’s my take.

Ecologies are systems of beings, through which each being interacts with another, either directly or through various degrees of separation. In the case of out Network Media blogs, this is true. We each link to other student’s blogs, with each person linking to different people than those who linked to them. This creates a chain, or more of a complicated series of hubs (some people get linked to a lot more than others), nodes and links. This series functions much like an ecology, with a blogs popularity (or life) dependent on other blogs in the chain. If a blog is not linked to enough, it loses popularity (gets lower search results in google). This occurs in much the same way that an animal in an ecology dies if it does not have enough food to eat (is not linked to enough other animals that it could survive on). In this way, blogs act as ecologies.

For another take on last week’s symposium, visit Kiralee, who talks about networks and their restrictions, or Mia, who remembered three interesting things, and finally Kenton, who looks in to Cowbird.