I blame Kevin Bacon. It’s only fair: he probably doesn’t know it, but the floppy fringed actor’s influence on the internet has been long felt, if unusual - and this year it’s everywhere.What are we talking about? Social networks. Now, don’t get all huffy. The influence of the one out of Footloose your sister fancied is not to be underestimated. Sure, it was the US sociologist Stanley Milgram who developed what he called the “Small World Hypothesis”, which said, in effect, that everyone was connected to everyone else by six degrees or less - but it was the famous Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon online game site that firmly implanted the obscure scientific theory into the hive mind of the internet.

[2] http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,870848,00.html