Salganik, Matthew J., and Duncan J. Watts. 2008. "Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market." Social Psychology Quarterly 71:338-355.

Turns out the 'herd' can be led astray, but only to a point. The real quality of digital media shows through. This is a great follow-up to Salganik's earlier experiments, published in Science.

On Marc Smith's recommendation:

Adamic, Lada A., Jun Zhang, Eytan Bakshy, and Mark S. Ackerman. 2008. "Knowledge sharing and yahoo answers: everyone knows something." in Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web. Beijing, China: ACM.

Marc is a fan of the way the authors handle large network graphs, and so am I. But I'm less sympathetic to the kind of clustering techniques they use. It's all so arbitrary – they end up writing things like: "We find that clustering the categories into three groups yields a result we find the most intuitively meaningful." That's fine, but we're not let in on the authors' intuition, and there's no reason to believe it's meaningful in any broad sense.