interesting MIT thesis on cultural dispersion of virtual fashion in the adornment of websites, by Ta-gang Chiou, which attempts to take co-citation analysis from the world of academic publishing and apply it to Geocities et al. to look at social spread of design ideas.

The paper focusses on personal expression of the personal home page variety, with its badly scanned photo of cats and rainbow-hued HR tags, rather than on the (possibly faster moving) fashion statements made by weblogs. The methods Chio uses, however, might provide a way to look at the cultural difussion of shared objects on weblogs, such as those "Which My Dinner With Andre? character are you?" quizzes that seem to rip through LiveJournal in a matter of hours. (Thanks Amber.)