Scholarship of social influence
On the Data Mining blog, an intriguing set of notes from talks on social influence by Duncan Watt and Jon Kleinberg at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media:3. Diffusion of information may 'long circuit' the small worlds of social networks. In Kleinberg's presentation regarding the study of the largest internet chain mail (a petition) he described the role of the threshold model of diffusion in which we require multiple receipts of a stimulus (e.g. a chain mail letter) to pass it on, we are more sensitive to our immediate community - our strong links - than to small-world building weak links. This seems to have some relationship with Watt's work on Challenging the Influentials Hypothesis and both his criticism of the disease analogy and his focus on the importance of the network structure, not some magical power of the 'influential'.Influence - not as simple as Gladwell would have you believe!
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Cory Doctorow
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