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(It is what one of our generous donors, Alec Reed, has written about under the term “ Peoplism”):Now, globalisation is diffusing power away from the west in particular, but also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups, humanitarian non-governmental organisations and super-empowered individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists. In an otherwise over-wrought analogy with the 12th Century published in the FT.com, Parag Khanna makes this interesting point about the centrifugal impact of the power of the individual in today’s globalisation.
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Understanding Dutton’s achievement has led me to a much better understanding of the web, of editorial processes, of the nature of authority … and has opened up some persistent questions about Darwinism, climate change scepticism, the American right, and the world of the mind. The phenomenon deserved investigation (and emulation – see for example, the more recent and impressive, but not yet as influential Browser). I discovered the power of what he did on the web very soon after arriving at openDemocracy: as soon as I arrived in 2006, I started to look at the data – where do our reads come from? what are the important positions on a page? what makes for the success – in readership terms – of an article? I made the important discovery that there was one web-site that stood head and shoulders above others in terms of influence: a recommendation on Arts and Letters Daily would drive tens of thousands of readers to an article a sort of online swarm of readers would aggregate on that one branch. I came back from my Christmas break to the sad news that Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts and Letters Daily, had died.