ptolemu's Journal: Survival of the fittest

I've been reading a lot on network theory lately and it has come to my attention that power laws play a deciding role in the distribution of information within the Internet. Research has shown that the few sites are are linked to by many, similar to hubs with manny links going in the site's direction. This has been a source of fear for some as it seems to suggest that the once sought-of democratic web is not what we thought it would be. Of course, this is natural network phenomena and as such I don't think that there is anything that we can do to eliminate this behaviour. Would it be possible to work within these constraints and somehow manage to go beyond the inevitable hyper nodes in a network? How would we mange this? If this is a naturally occuring phenomenon of netoworks how is it possible to create a network without this occuring? Do we even need to fear these hubs? It's not that our access outside of these hubs has been cut off but that the less links you have to the rest of the network the smaller the chance you have of being seen. Would it be viable to pursue a strategy in which you attracted attention to yourself via these supernodes? How would you avoid being lost amongst an array of other people also attracting attention? At first thought it seems that the best way is to create some sort of stratified system that sorts content but I find that this defeats certain aspects of the Internet. If not categorization then what? To create democracy it would be necessary that everyone has an equally strong voice but how is this possible when dealing with millions of voices? Perhaps a middleperson or some sort of aggregator is the key. Three layers: user, aggregator, content. Of course this would mean that content should be in a highly structured format and that in itself is quite imposing I find. It would require resources that not everyone could afford. This is certainly a large question to be answered. I just wanted to play with it a little...