Tag Archives: 80/20 rule

Thoughts

WIN – win

Last symposium we talked about Apple. Adrian used the corporation in terms of the Power Law graphs to give us a sense of their practical usage. As it went, individual popular music tracks that sold considerably more (and therefore formed the ‘head’ of the graph) were still less profitable than the aggregate of tracks that sold much less (and formed the ‘tail’).

This is the main reason behind Apple’s decision to preserve those tracks that formed the tail; it didn’t cost them more to store them (unless you’re counting up to well past ten decimal points), and it offered a continuous even if irregular flow of income to those who owned the rights to the tracks. As Jason put it, it’s a win win situation, except some win a lot more than others.

I guess we can try to change the analogy to suit the internet, if the funds received by each track sold equates to reputation or information being earned by each connection made. It works with FaceBook too, the millions (if not billions) of us ‘average’ people currently on FaceBook offer a lot more information than those few ‘important’ celebrities that reel in all the likes. But then doesn’t that demonstrate opposite reasoning with the argument behind the 80/20 rule?

To be continued…

 

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Reading reflections

The 80/20 Rule

80-20

Vilfredo Pareto noticed one day that 80 percent of his peas were produced by only 20 percent of his pea pods, he then made an interesting link between this observation and other sociological aspects of life (much of which is identical to Murphy’s Laws of Management). 80% of Italy’s land was owned by 20% of the Italian population, 80% of profits are produced by only 20% of the employees, 80% of the customer service problems are created by only 20% of the customers and so on.

The reading goes on to use the example of America’s highway maps vs America’s plane routings to instantiate the difference between a “random” network, which abides to the rules of a bell curve, and one that follows the Power Laws, which describes an ever decreasing curve. As such, the connections the highways made from city to city ranged from one to three, with no particularly better connected “nodes”, whereas the plane routings sketched out a few cities with a huge number of connections to other smaller cities (or nodes), and many cities with only those larger nodes as connections.

If we look back at last week’s symposium, we talked about how there could not be a ‘centre’ in the web. Even before the internet grew to be what it is today, people had predicted that, like most things in nature, information dissemination would follow a bell curve, so even then, people knew no node could be the centre. I think that this Power Law kind of shows us that where there can be nodes with extraordinarily large numbers of links, no node will ever connect to everything else in less than one step or link on the internet. As Watts argued in previous readings, our social circles’ makeup has created a small-world problem, and we are no further then 3 steps from more than half of the population on earth, but there is no way a single person is exactly one step away from everyone else, this can easily be applied to the laws of the web.

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