Here Comes Everybody

My uncle Howard was a small-town newspaperman, publishing the local paper for Richmond, Missouri (population 5,000). The paper, founded by my grandfather, was the family business, and ink ran in Howard’s blood. I can still remember him fulminating about the rise of USA Today; he criticized it as “TV on paper” and held it up as further evidence of t

Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos but also comment on other users’ photos, like a host circulating at a party.

aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts.

When sociologists talk about social capital, they often make a distinction between bonding capital and bridging capital. Bonding capital is an increase in the depth of connections and trust within a relatively homogenous group; bridging capital is an increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups.

Because of homophily, the value to you that comes from one of your friends plugging into the network is much higher than the value of a random stranger half the world away plugging in, but as we are increasingly seeing with examples like the Sichuan quake, the connections don’t all have to be direct to be valuable. Having Kaiser Kuo on Twitter was

And this is the Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

social networks are held together not by the bulk of people with hundreds of connections but by the few people with tens of thousands.

We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change.

To label something a profession means to define the ways in which it is more than just a job. In the case of newspapers, professional behavior is guided both by the commercial imperative and by an additional set of norms about what newspapers are, how they should be staffed and run, what constitutes good journalism, and so forth. These norms are en

The larger the number of users required, the harder the group is to get going, because the potential users will (rightly) be more skeptical that enough users will join to make it worth their while.