Jan. 10, 2006 - 6 Degrees of Separation: An Experiment

There is a game known as ‘6 Degrees of Separation’ (from Kevin Bacon - no relation to the best of my knowledge). The way the game works is to try to connect 2 famous people via 6 associations. We have been watching the blogsphere for the last year or so and believe that nearly all blogging homeschoolers will hear about important news items, etc. within 3 days of the first mention in a HS blog.

This experiment will work as follows:

1- If this is the first blog in which you have seen this post and you would like to contribute to the experiment, copy the entire post and post it in your blog.

2- Modify the post to add a link to your blog which displays the appropriate degree you are from the original in the following list:

{original, first degree, second degree, third degree, fourth degree, fifth degree, sixth degree }

That way, visitors can directly see the chain of communication that ended with this post in your blog.

3- Leave a comment in the blog where you first viewed this post indicating that your blog is among the next degree.

4- If you are a homeschooler or are interested in/considering homeschooling and either do not have a blog, would prefer not to blog this or the sixth degree is already taken, you can still contribute to this experiment by leaving a comment in the blog where you first read it.

5- After 3 days report back how many people read, commented and blogged based on your post to the blog where you first read this. (They only report this blog would receive is from the degree below and this blog will report the total from below and comments here to the degree above.) To illustrate how this would work let’s suppose that in this imaginary example every blog has approximately the same number of readers and that each blog entry for each degree ends up with exactly the same number of comments.

Let’s say that each blog would receive 2 comments where the experiment was posted and 2 comments from non-bloggers. This would produce the following:

original: 2 + 2 = 4
first: ( 2 * 2 ) + 2 = 6
second: ( 2 * 4 ) + 2 = 10
third: ( 2 * 8 ) + 2 = 18
fourth: ( 2 * 16 ) + 2 = 34
fifth: ( 2 * 32 ) + 2 = 66
sixth: ( 2 * 64 ) + 2 = 130

That totals 268. If you change the number of experiment posts to 3, the result is ( 5 + 11 + 29 + 83 + 245 + 731 + 2189 = ) 3293. Consider what the number would be when we average about 60 readers a day. (Welcome to math 101) Let’s allow a week for the reporting to roll back through the earlier degrees.