FRANK ROSE

YOU HAVE A BLOG. You compose a new post. You click “Publish” and lean back to admire your work. Meanwhile, imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post has slipped into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will make sure your post gets to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

Let’s say it’s Super Bowl Sunday and you’re blogging about beer. Budweiser has ponied up $2.7 million to present a message to more than 90 million viewers in 30 seconds of high-intensity video. You see that spot and have your own message to share. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people too—and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad critics and your ex-boyfriend can all listen in. “You just need to know how to type,” says Matthew Hurst, an artificial intelligence researcher who studies this ecosystem at Microsoft Live Labs. Here’s how it all goes down during the big game.