Here Comes Everybody

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.

First, most good ideas came from people who were bridging “structural holes,” which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Second, bridging these structural holes was valuable even when other variables, such as rank and age (both of which correlate for higher degrees of social connection), were

The two basic organizational imperatives—acquire resources, and use them to pursue some goal or agenda—saddle every organization with the institutional dilemma, whether its goal is saving souls or selling soap. The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is “What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away?

Even when the judicious use of social connections increases the proportion of good ideas, most ideas are still bad. It’s not enough to find some way to increase the successful ideas. Some way needs to be found to tolerate the failures too.

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.

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

It is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence.

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