In Dave Winer’s session now, good stuff. I asked a question about the accidents of history that made Blogistan what it is today, like Extreme Tracking’s free site-stats service. Etreme doesn’t charge any money for stats-gathering and reporting, but if you get the free service, anyone can see your stats. The “premium” service costs money, and keeps the stats private. The outcome of this has been hundreds (thousands?) of blogs that have public referrer logs and hit-counters. This makes the Blogosphere much more interesting. I can follow one of my referrers to a site, then look at its links, and its referrers and look at how many visitors it gets, and so on, and keep on doing this forever. This deep-crawling is like a signpost on the road to a Web with about seven additional dimensions made of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, as represneted by ASCII text files that can be programatically mined and moved and parsed. Link Discuss