September 2011
Beginner
188 pages
4h 57m
English
Content preview from Social Network Analysis for StartupsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 6. Going Viral! Information Diffusion
This chapter is probably why you picked up this book in the first place. Many people wonder how things (videos, sites, news, and so on) “go viral” online—diffuse rapidly and become a part of the culture (and in the process, make their authors rich). We should forewarn you that we have no ready-made recipe. Nobody really has a recipe, and there is a fair bit of luck involved—but in this chapter we’ll try to get you closer to understanding what drives diffusion and how your decisions can drive adoption of a product.
Anatomy of a Viral Video
Let us suppose that you made a really cute video of your cat, posted it on YouTube and Tweeted about it. Are you on your way to riches? Well, it depends.
It largely depends on who sees it and what they do with it afterwards. At first, the only people that see it are in your immediate ego network—i.e., your friends. As such, growth in the number of views is very slow; it is linear over time, meaning that views happen at a constant rate. In this case, we can describe the number of views as a Poisson process, where every act of viewing your cat video is independent of every other act. At the end, the total number of views you would get would be mathematically related to the number of followers you have—your degree centrality.
But if something else happens and your friends retweet the video to their friends (and so on, exposing more and more people to it), your cat is suddenly in the most popular video on YouTube, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.