The Barabasi reading considered the idea of rules to explain the ‘network behind the web.’  Barabasi structured his article around Pareto’s Law known as the “80/20 rule.” That basically said that ‘four-fifths of our efforts are largely irrelevant’.

To explain this point, Barabasi used examples in management. So, 80% of profits are produced by only 20% of employees. Which to elaborate on in terms of the economy seems to say as the title of the 2nd reading does “The Rich get Richer”.

Anyway, the point of this reading wasn’t for us to examine the economy (well perhaps as a side note) but to see how the 80/20 rule can be applied to networked media. In terms of finding an exact science that has created the network, various studies have been conducted. It was hypothesized that ‘webpages are connected to each other randomly’.

Enter: The POWER Law. So basically, this power law doesn’t peak like a bell curve and implies that many small events coexist with a few large events. What they found, was that “millions of website creators work together” (perhaps inadvertently) “to generate a complex Web that defies a random universe”.

And in some way, I think this includes us as we are webpage creators of our own mediafactory sites. Together we create this network that operates the web.