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The People Law

Britt Blaser has a good and useful post about "People Law" vs "Power Law." This is practice, not theory. [Link]

There are five principles I’m playing with lately:

1. The size of your audience confers limited power
2. A network’s value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)
3. Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose
4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes
5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most

... what’s the importance of a big audience of passive readers? In the age of Big Media, It was the only thing we could count, but those times are months behind us. In social networks, everyone is a potential participant, but if your 10,000 readers leave 100 comments but don’t take your ideas and run with them, so what? Leaving a comment is a lot like leaving, because Embrace is not the same as Extend.

jon posted this at 5:15 PM
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