Following on from the Jon Udell article, Paul Hammond pointed me to this blog/biological crossover from Mark Bernstein.
“There’s still a lot nobody really knows about weblogs. How do you get, and keep, a great audience? Does the future hold a million small weblogs, or two really big ones?
I’m hoping to learn about weblogs from an alife simulator I’m building. In the simulated world, we have 600 little artificial writers (I call them weblets) with 600 artificial weblogs. If traffic is the currency of the Web, each of the weblets wants to get rich.
Some have big blogrolls (so lots of people will think well of them). Some have lots of daily links (so they can reward their friends quickly). Some hoard traffic, some spread it around. We’ll see who wins.”
Sorry about all these blog-related posts. I don’t want to become one of those boring sites that just bangs on about blogs the whole time, but there is a lot of stuff looking at the second-order effects of the blog ecology at the moment.
Petafloptimism 
Wow. That’s kind of geeky… interesting to see what the results are, but will they really be relevant to the *real* world?
Also, I don’t see a future with two really big blogs. It doesn’t seem to me that it works that way: companies merge, writers don’t. Surely there’s a large number of bloggers out there who would write even if their audience was miniscule?