This week’s reading by Barabasi was interesting at times, however I still became lost in all the terminology. It took me waaaay back to my final year in school, learning about networks and how to calculate bell curves and histograms. My hatred for this subject in maths was probably the reason why I didn’t like this reading as much as the others.

However, Barabasi does bring up some intriguing points in his chapter. The 80/20 rule can explain many different statistics and their truisms, but it can’t explain the Web. I found it interesting that “80 per cent of links on the Web point to only 15 per cent of Webpages.”  He also states that whilst there are a lot of ‘nodes’, there actually isn’t that many links, but rather hubs with loads of links in them. He also mentions ‘power laws’ a lot and that webpages often follow this 80/20 expression.

The information below is taken from Wikipedia which really helped me to understand the concept of the 80/20 rule:

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Business-management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; he developed the principle by observing that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.

It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients”. Mathematically, the 80-20 rule is roughly followed by a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution) for a particular set of parameters, and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.

The Pareto principle is only tangentially related to Pareto efficiency, which was also introduced by the same economist. Pareto developed both concepts in the context of the distribution of income and wealth among the population.