You know what's scary about this in afterthought? It's the fact that I only remember 2 of the people from this list and one's dead! I can image some sort of massive datamining operation which puts me on some sort of list because of my relationship with these other people. Scary thought. Definitely need to be careful when registering at conferences.

We're a long way from the point where computers can accurately describe human relationships, I think. And conferences are tricky. Connections are often serendipitous, not obviously traceable.

I got a "map" of PopTech speakers before the conference that looks very much like the diagram you reference here. I wondered what it was, and how it was generated...it may well have been similar software. While it looked tr駸 cool at first, the more I studied it, the less accurate it seemed in terms of the relationships. There were a good many strong ties that weren't indicated (for example, that Judith Donath was a student of Eliot Soloway's).

I've been thinking about blogmapping this week, and the difficulty in trying to represent those relationships with traditional geometry. I hear the term "blog circles" used a lot, but circles are too constraining a term for these amorphous collections.

Massive datamining? Like this? You are in big trouble! I guess I am, too. Shoot. I think there are going to be more people in trouble than there are people to hunt us down. Which brings me to what I think is the vulnerability of any technology-enabled totalitarian society -- bureaucracy. You can have the niftiest panoptic infrastructure in the world, but if your bureaucracy is big enough, it works against itself. Remember the FBI agent in Phoenix who thought these fellows taking flying lessons were worth watching -- and his supervisors who didn't want to rock the boat?

The Six Degrees of Joichi Ito, ... er, Koichi.

Interesting.. I like these machine generated analysis even if the rationales behind them are often flawed.. they are fun.. And they do tell us things..

Just for fun I plugged your name into googleism.. (www.googleism.com) the algorithm- - generated output often seems a bit like poetry to me..

and here is what came out...

Googlism for: joichi ito
joichi ito is
joichi ito is president and ceo of neoteny
joichi ito is a leading internet visionary and entrepreneur in japan
joichi ito is founder and president of neoteny co
joichi ito is the president and founder of neoteny
joichi ito is a poster child for the it revolution in japan
joichi ito is the founder and ceo of neoteny co
joichi ito is the president of psinet japan
joichi ito is back
joichi ito is a living
joichi ito is an entrepreneur with a calling
joichi ito is the
joichi ito is the founder and ceo of neoteny
joichi ito is the ceo of neoteny incorporated
joichi ito is quoted as saying that he thinks the wide

...

And thats it...

:)

Interesting... I did a similar mapping of my network @ Ryze... of course the Ryze link data is somewhat misleading.

Valdis' Ryze Network