Drawing the analogy from the Vonnegut dichotemy of social structures, one of them (the granfalloon) being organized by decree and org-chart, official and structured and chained and constrained to inffectuality, and the other one (the karass) representing those social networks which actually get the work done, Discover.com reports on new software that analyses corporate email to suss out who it is that belongs to which group - now, put in the hands of a burocrat, that idea in itself strikes me as kinda freaky but what really surprises me about the article is that it does not mention applying the same social stratification analysis to the blogosphere.

The notion in the software is toward refining the organization to include those people who actually do report to each other and to also show which of even the Karass cliques avoid interaction with other Karass cliques. In the context of the weblog, though, it reminds me of Matt Jones commentary on bridges and bubbles in social computing, and especially his later amendment cautioning us about drawing too much reality out of our maps!