Self-organization, Self-regulation, and Self-similarity on the Fractal Web

Abstract

The authors begin by modelling the World Wide Web as an ecosystem, which reflects an intimate coupling of people, programs, and pages. Viewing the Web from a variety of scales and viewpoints, from macroscopic to microcscopic, it is evident that users, authors, and search engines all influence one another to yield an amazing array of self-organization, self-regulation, and self-similarity. Ultimately, the Web’s organization is intimately related to the complexity of human culture and to the human mind, and it is this subtle relationship between humanity and the Web that is responsible for the Web’s amazing properties.