full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Steven Johnson: The Web as a city

Unscramble the Blue Letters


And so the question is, "Why is this happening?" It's not being imposed by fiat from above. It's an ergmenet property of the brogophslee right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on — within sdcneos of Clay publishing this piece, ppeloe staterd working on changing the unrlnideyg rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of lnkis, and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the fuurte, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started wioknrg on, literally as Shirky started — after he published his piece — was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a bnuch of links in the last 24 hours.

Open Cloze


And so the question is, "Why is this happening?" It's not being imposed by fiat from above. It's an ________ property of the ___________ right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on — within _______ of Clay publishing this piece, ______ _______ working on changing the __________ rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of _____, and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the ______, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started _______ on, literally as Shirky started — after he published his piece — was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a _____ of links in the last 24 hours.

Solution


  1. links
  2. underlying
  3. people
  4. working
  5. future
  6. seconds
  7. emergent
  8. started
  9. bunch
  10. blogosphere

Original Text


And so the question is, "Why is this happening?" It's not being imposed by fiat from above. It's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on — within seconds of Clay publishing this piece, people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links, and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started working on, literally as Shirky started — after he published his piece — was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
google share 5
west village 2
great city 2
interesting ways 2
britney spears 2
ted conference 2
mola fish 2
natural selection 2
started working 2
underlying rules 2


Important Words


  1. accumulate
  2. advantage
  3. appearing
  4. appears
  5. basically
  6. blogosphere
  7. bunch
  8. changing
  9. clay
  10. dave
  11. emergent
  12. fiat
  13. future
  14. gave
  15. great
  16. happening
  17. hours
  18. imposed
  19. interesting
  20. kind
  21. largely
  22. link
  23. links
  24. literally
  25. lot
  26. newcomers
  27. people
  28. piece
  29. priority
  30. property
  31. published
  32. publishing
  33. question
  34. quickly
  35. rules
  36. seconds
  37. shape
  38. shirky
  39. sifry
  40. site
  41. start
  42. started
  43. suddenly
  44. system
  45. technorati
  46. underlying
  47. working