Bio-blogical analogies

Bio-blogical analogies are in the air: This article by Jon Udell on the O’Reilly Network, Blogspace Under the Microscope, pursues a biological metaphor for how networks of blogs can join together to form larger entities in the same way that single-celled organisms can join together to form multi-cellular organisms. It’s a little bit of a stretch, but it’s got the right idea. Soon after I read that article, I came across a piece by Steven Johnson on Salon, in which Johnson compares a blog with a neuron (actually, he’s drawing on the image originally published by James Wolcott at Business 2.0). I find this blog-as-neuron image apt and very appealing: there are interesting parallels between the cell and the blog. Neuronal dendrites correspond to the inbound links that a blogger regularly reads, whereas axons are the outbound links to other bloggers that read and respond to his posts. Sure enough, blogs form themselves into constantly evolving networks that pass messages from here to there. It’s a good meme… pass it on.