Hubs and experts

Eugene's discussion on SocialText and its use in 'the real word' was very interesting--especially the concept of hubs. Like in search engines, if you map who references whom, you will find certain websites standout as being referenced more than others: the experts. In the SocialText paradigm, you look at how many followers people have. The assumption is that people with lots of followers can act as hubs of communications and information. Certainly the greater the followers, the more communications to that person will be 'heard' by others. Another useful measure would be who receives the most communications from others. If one could assume that a large percentage of these communications were queries of some sort; you might be able to conclude that this person is an information broker. Being able to identify such information brokers is a useful because these are the people who, as Eugene said, know who knows.