Rating: 
Summary: Great explanatory power!
Review: Nowadays, everybody talks about networks. Yet, what networks really are and how they function, often remains rather vague in conversations. This book offers great insight into the evolution, the structure and the relevance of networks. The author, Albert Barabási, himself a creative and important contributor to network science, makes the rapid and fascinating advances made in this field comprehensible. Our world is filled with complex networks, webs of highly connected nodes. Not all nodes are equal, however. In fact, in many real-world complex networks, there is a typical hierarchy of nodes (called a POWERLAW DISTRIBUTION). This means there are a few extremely well connected nodes (these are called HUBS), there are quite a few moderately connected nodes and there are large numbers of tiny nodes (having very few connections to other nodes). The Internet, for instance, has only several hubs - like amazon.com and Yahoo - and countless tiny nodes -like my own website :-(. The structure of networks with a powerlaw distribution is called a SCALEFREE TOPOLOGY. Such a scale free topology is found in networks that 1) are GROWING (extra nodes and links emerge), and 2) are characterised by PREFERENTIAL ATTACHMENT (this means that some links are far more likely to get linked than others). Preferential attachment, is driven by two factors: 1) the number of links the node already has (this is in fact the first mover advantage: a nodes that has been there since the early development of the network gets the biggest chance to get connected), and 2) the node's fitness (for instance a new website offering a truely unique service has an excellent chance to get many links). A fascinating characteristic of scale free networks is the following. The density of the interconnectivity paradoxically creates two properties at the same time: 1) ROBUSTNESS (removing nodes will not easily lead to the breakdown of the network, precisely because of the fact that all nodes are connected. Only simultaneous removal of the largest hubs will break down the network), and 2) VULNERABILITY TO ATTACK (because of the fact that all nodes are indirectely connected to each other failures, like viruses, can very easily spread through the whole network. This phenomenon is called 'cascading failures'. Reading this book made me realise that the recently acquired knowledge about networks is revolutionizing many fields of science, like biology, medical science and economics. Also, the practical applications will be numerous, like protecting the internet, fighting terrorist networks, finding a cure for cancer (!), and developing new organizational forms.
Rating: 
Summary: There was a life before...
Review: "Linked" presents a reasonable overview of what was done
by physicists these last years in the field
of networks. However, this book is very subjective
and the author essentially cites his own work
without almost no reference to previous important work.
In particular, sociologists, mathematicians and other
physicists worked on networks before 1999 (when Barbasi
published his first paper in the field) and the
poor bibliography does not give credit to them.
In addition, the author falls short on application
of the theory: apart from some trivial conclusions
the theory is not yet ready to help people finding a job,
improving their business or understanding
a terrorists network !
Rating:
Summary: Linky-link
Review: I found this book to be entertaining. As though anyone REALLY knows how the world is put together! Interesting enough in theory, but Barabasi's evidence was not convincing enough for me. It's another attempt to popularize science, and a fairly good one, but that doesn't necessarily make its ideas true. Think skeptically--like a scientist would.
Rating: 
Summary: Good overview of networks but author a bit naive
Review: "Linked" gives a good overview of what networks are and the effects they have on phenomena like business, mathematics, marketing and biology. The author does however seem to think no one knew about networks and network effects until he started researching it in 97 or 98. So if you know something about networks this will be a bit irritating. If you've read "New rules for the new economy" by Kevin Kelly a lot of the thoughts are going to be old news but Barbasi does take the ideas one step further and that makes the book worth a read.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book about a fascinating topic
Review: Linked is an excellent example of the new science writing. Dr. Barabasi winds a fascinating subject up with first rate examples that make the subject come alive. His style is quite accessable yet precise, and he makes the reader feel like a colaborator even through the hard parts. A delightful read.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed bag
Review: I regret to say, that this book did not provide many "Ah Ha!" moments for me, and I also didn't think that it was a compelling "readable" read. There is very valuable information contained in the book, but I look for books about popular science that are also entertaining. This was not entertaining, but instead, tedious.
Rating:
Summary: A big book in a small world
Review: The transformation of hierarchies into networks is a defining characteristic of the information age. Linked helps us understand this brave new world of hubs, connectors, power laws and self-organization. If you care about the future, you should read this book.
Rating:
Summary: A New Mathematics and Its Applications
Review: What do sexually transmitted diseases, the World Wide Web, the electric power grid, Al Queda terrorists, and a cocktail party have in common? They are all networks. They conform to surprising mathematical laws which are only now becoming clear. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has helped discover some of those laws over just the past five years, and though they are some pretty abstruse mathematics, he has written a clear and interesting guide to them, _Linked: The New Science of Networks_ (Perseus Publishing). Not only has he attempted in this book to bring the math to non-mathematicians, he has shown why the work is important in down-to-earth applications. It is important for those multitudes who have no taste for math to know that this is not a book full of equations; Barabasi knows that for most of his readers, doing the math is not as important as getting a feel for what the math does. He explains the basic history of network theory, and then shows how his own work has turned it into a closer model of reality, a model that most of us will recognize. Networks are all around us, and they are simply not random. Some of our friends, for instance, are loners, while others seem to know everyone in town. Some websites, like Google and Amazon, we just cannot avoid clicking on or being referred to, but many others are obscure and you could only find them if someone sent you their addresses. Barabasi calls these "nodes" with such an extraordinary number of links "hubs," and he and his students have found laws of networks with hubs, showing such things as how they can continue to function if random nodes are eliminated but they fragment if the hubs are hit. Barabasi is currently doing research to show what intracellular proteins interact with other proteins, and true to form, some of them are hubs of reactions with lots of others. Finding the hubs of cancerous cells, for instance, and developing ways of taking them out, show enormous promise in the fight against cancer. And finding the hub terrorists in Al Queda in order to take them out would be the best way to eliminate the network. Barabasi obviously enjoys drawing examples from all over, and because of his ability to link them, his book is a pleasure to read. He also shows how this type of mathematics is being done, by conference in obscure European locales and by e-mail. He shows how "eureka" insights by his students have propelled the new science, and he is full of good stories from a teacher. In fact, he is a good teacher, and those who follow along here will have reason to be glad to join, if only in the role of isolated nodes, into this network of mathematical thought.
Rating:
Summary: The Importance of Hubs
Review: I really enjoyed this eminently readable book. I consumed it in one sitting last night. Not only is it intellectually stimulating, "Linked" has proved to be quite practical. My business involves the facilitation of entrepreneurial networks. Laszlo Barabasi's erudite explanation of scale-free networks helped me better understand a mis-match between the structure of the network we serve and the structuring and pricing of our services. The former won't change, so we're working hard to figure out how to better adapt the latter.
Rating:
Summary: Cotton Candy--Lots of Air, Some Sugar, No Bibliography
Review:
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also--being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate--somewhat shallow and empty.... especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme. Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks--called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility. Among the key points that the author discusses and which certainly make the book worth buying and reading, my above reservations not-with-standing: 1) Reductionism has driven 20th century science (and one might add, all other knowledge), with the result being that we have experts who know more and more about less and less--and )as CIA and FBI recently found)while leaving us devoid of generalists and multi-disciplinary artists and scientists who can "connect the dots" across these fragmented foci. 2) Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about networks being equally distributed and thus largely invulnerable to catastrophic meltdown, the author does a fine job of documenting the importance of selected "hubs", so important that their removal ultimately breaks the network down into isolated pieces. The functionality of the network, its strength, is also its weakness--vulnerability to deliberate attack against the hubs (the author does not mention the Internet domain directories except in passing while discussing a table error, but MAYEAST and MAYWEST would be two obvious directory hubs that could be better protected through replication). 3) The author inadvertently makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how to defend America against terrorism--discussing why no single authority can close down the Internet by fiat, he notes "The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible." LOCALLY GUARDED--this is the key phrase. Federalizing counter-terrorism, and using federal agents and computers at the state and local levels, will not be effective against terrorists in civilian guise within the homeland--only a complete extension of counterintelligence and counterterrorism methods to the state & local level--teaching them to fish for terrorists, rather than trying to catch the terrorists with federal trawlers, is the way to go. 4) The author flirts with what is known as nomadic computing, making the point that nodes built around individual people are becoming as important--some would say more important--in a networked economy than nodes built around static organizations. There is a useful general discussion of how "fitness" in a networked economy is a combination of speed and scalability as well as diversity of linkages. As a general rule, as the FBI found (and also CIA, INS, and the State Department), systems with a single hub resistant to initiative from the field offices will tend to be slow and ineffective. Missing from this populist overview is a discussion of the vital importance of geospatial information. While the author helpfully notes the Earth is increasingly covered by an electronic "skin" with millions of measuring devices, with experts predicting that by 2010 there will "around 10,000 telemetric devices for each human on the planet" (one suspects this refers only to privileged humans, not the billions of dispossessed that lack telephones, never mind computers), he does not take the next essential step, which is to note that in the absence of an XML-GEO standard and a global push to associate geospatial as well as temporal tags with all data, much of what we collect will, like the trillions of bits we have collected with secret satellites, never get processed in a meaningful manner. This is a helpful book that will be of value to the general reader at the elementary (adult) level.
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