Are we seeing the rise of a new threat on the internet? That of Scoble 'Unsubscribing' you?

“Slate is a Microsoft company, but I will subscribe from the feed if they don't fix this. And soon. If I subscribe, that means I'll be far less likely to point to you and talk about you.”

Are we seeing the beginning of a whole new revolution in media? Scoble has been on about power over the past few weeks... This blogging thing seems to me to be bringing some of the disruptive power of peer to peer style communications into the more public arena of the web.

How much power does a single person have over the traffic of a site or the ranking on google? With the trickle down effect of posts and reposts through the blog hierarchy the decisions of an 'A-List' blogger must surely have quite wide ranging repercussions. Dare referenced some research being done by HP into some of these blog power network ideas (Blog Epidemic Analyser) and is fairly critical of it. I'm not so pessimistic- I think that some really cool ideas could come out of a temporal analysis of blog interlinking. It would be interesting to see how the migration of data through the internet over time might be related to viral propogation.

Maybe Scoble is more of a Wheezing Sneezing Superbug Carrier on the plane from Hong Kong....

Are there sub propogation structures within interest groups? i.e. Does a piece of information (a post or a link) travel more slowly between interest groups (countries) and then spread quickly within that interest group? Or is it, as I suspect, quite the opposite where links propogate quickly through 'hub' blogs but once they reach an interest group there is a reluctance to indulge in too much re-posting lest we end up with a caucophonous echo chamber?

How quickly does news travel through the blogosphere? How does it survive the trip accuracy wise? To what extent does blogging suffer from Chinese Whisper syndrome where everybody wants (or feels the need) to add their 2c worth. Are there mutation effects that can be easily identified where information is added, removed or spun to the posters views?

Maybe it does warrant some research after all..... I have got a Masters degree to complete shortly.... *ponders*... What do you think?

[Update]

Others think Scoble is a sneezer too....
http://www.webjives.com/archive/2004_03_01_archive.html#107869771669068939