Tag Archives: barabasi

07 READING: THE RICH GET RICHER RULE

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The second reading for the week was again by Barabasi, on the “rich get richer” rule. To be perfectly honest, this week’s readings have (so far) failed to interest me. They seem to just drizzle on about nodes and hubs and linking and wind up getting a bit complicated.

Barabasi compares networks such as the Web to Hollywood to demonstrate his points. This is what I got from the reading:

– If networks as varied as the Web and Hollywood both display a power-law degree distribution then there must be some universal law responsible for it that could apply to ALL networks

– The rich get richer phenomenon could explain the power laws

– EVERYONE agrees that the Web is growing

– Despite the enormity and complexity of the web it continues to grow incrementally node by node

– If we consider Hollywood with the Web both start as small networks and then expand as time goes on.

– Most real networks share an essential feature: GROWTH

– We link to things based on our knowledge and experience of the world
– When deciding where to link on the web we follow preferential attachment: So while our individual choices are unpredictable as a group we follow strict patterns.

Hopefully next week’s readings are a little more interesting…

 

 

 

 

07 READING: THE 80/20 RULE

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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.