The post on Talented Apps looks at the role of humans in the network the concept of balancing the size of the network (the number of the participants) and the voice of the individual.
A recent post Harvard Business Review: Four Ways of looking at Twitter demonstrates how trends can be pulled from social networks. Another post Tech Crunch: Five Ways to Mix, Rip and Mash your Data. provides an overview of tools that can be used to build agents to bring together information from RSS feeds and other sources giving people more tool sets to gauge information flow.
But what does popularity in tweets or RSS Feeds mean?
I find myself tossing between two quotes:
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
- George Bernard Shaw
and
"There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause." - P.J. O'Rourke