NetWork

Social capital talk comes with some specious reasoning about how it works. At heart, I think we don't really know how it does, since our knowledge of human behaviour is spotty at best. 

What we do know is that contention abounds, which is why I'm presenting, just for you, a couple of articles that popped up in my feed reader before SI began. As I read them, I starred them, thinking they might come in handy some day. Ta da! Welcome to some day. 

The first is an interview with Duncan Watts, who explores the issue of Gladwell's hubs. You may recall that Barabasi also mentions Watts in at least one of the three chapters we read. His experiments with social cartography (what a great phrase) shows that Influentials--individuals with many social ties--may be able to spread their influence to a broader network, but they are no more likely than someone with few ties to start a trend.  

Second, Rob Paterson, who blogs for the FASTForward blog, recently talked about the idea of the long tail of Internet content development. Plotting this along a Fibonacci sequence, he says something like, 'hmm, maybe my weak-ties have more breadth, but my few strong-ties sure have a lot of pull.' In this case, he sees growth being in the little circles of trust that crop up out of the endless content. 

I left my math brain behind in junior high school. I'm starting to regret that.