I've been thinking some more about the issues I raised in my earlier How to run a conspiracy posting. Here are some ideas that build on that. [2396 words...] (27 February 2008)
With the new year I'm introducing a new top-level category on my Web site for "economics"; some past postings that fit in there have been moved into the new category, which will probably break links. Anyway, today's new item is from an article in Science News on the place of highly influential individuals (called "influentials") in viral propagation of ideas. New research by Watts and Dodds (PDF preprint) suggests that such individuals aren't so important after all; if you want lots of people to adopt something, you're actually better off concentrating on the most easily influenced people in the population, so as to get as many of those as possible. Sheer numbers are the important factor, not having the adopters be the more influential members of the population. [1665 words...] (6 January 2008)
It seems like the holy grail of social networking is the "only Cool people" security level. Whoever figures out how to do that and have it really work properly will make a huge amount of money; but since it's probably not actually possible, that's going to be difficult. [3009 words...] (12 August 2007)
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