My friend Sarah Granger's written a piece on small worlds in networks and real life for MindJack.
My friend — Ben — is the Kevin Bacon of the wired world. Everybody knows somebody who knows Ben. For example, Chuck, a friend from college (Michigan — where, incidentally, they don't need AC for server farms — they just put them outside), worked for a big consulting firm after graduation. There, he met Jason, who had previously worked with Ben in college. Alan S., whom I also met in college, did graduate work at Stanford and met up with Scott, who started a company and enlisted Alan B., who was previously Ben's roommate in Illinois and had worked with Tamara at SGI. (Really, there is a point to the Russian-style character introduction.) Here's where the theorizing about Ben, Kevin Bacon, and high-tech's two degrees of separation all began. But that was all a few years after I met Ben.
I first met Ben at a conference in 1994 in Tennessee, not generally a hot spot for new tech widgets. We made friends and kept in touch by e-mail for the next few years as I moved out to Silicon Valley & he started graduate work in the mid-west. Eventually he needed a change of scenery, so he moved out to finish his PhD at Berkeley. During this time, he worked for NSF and flew all over the country doing work related to the Digital Libraries Initiative. He knows a lot of people who work in all aspects of high-tech, so somehow it came about that everybody knows somebody who knows Ben.
