Clay Shirky suggests that tools such as Blogdex, Technorati and now Waypath Buzz Maker fall into a category of “latent” social software tools that discover and plot connections, groups and emerging issues from the general hubbub of blog traffic and content
As he points out, the Waypath tool is very limited right now, and every graph it produces shows the same trough in late August caused by its database crashing, but with more and more content out there, perhaps we need tools like this to help us identify linkages between our own work and that of others.