"... For good measure, Milgram's Six Degrees theory, has subsequently been debunked since Tipping Point appeared. Gladwell couldn't have done that himself using a bit of investigative research of his own ..."Don't let the truth get in the way of telling a good story. Well that's the way 'theregister' likes to tell it.
The ideas behind the "6 degrees of separation" are measurable and form a new type of science, not surprisingly called Network theory. The ideas behind them instead of being debunked are strengthening. In '99, "Duncan Watts" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_Watts and "Steven Strogatz" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Strogatz wrote a paper submitted to Nature working on the "Small World theory" problem called "Collective dynamics of 'small-world' networks" . Their results tend to support the idea that there is a measurable, finite, minimum number of links in a network between nodes and that clustering of node links does occur. The idea applied to various other natural networks (Actors in Hollywood, neural networks in the brain, Transmission lines across the US) also support the conclusions.
"... a scale-free network is a network
whose degree distribution follows a
power law ..."
Then consider
"Albert-László Barabási" ~
http://www.nd.edu/~sciwww/Faculty/barabasi.html who who picked up the Watts-Strogatz work ~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model and came up with the idea of
"Scale free networks" ~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_networks which gives probably the most important insight into how networks cluster, Hubs.
I don't just believe the ideas of Watts, Strogatz and Barabási because of who they are but what their experiments reveal.