"TIPPING ON THE WEB
Understanding how Link Mavens and Connectors work transformed my thoughts of how ideas spread. You can literally see the process take place online in a way that is virtually impossible in real life.
It's generally a five-step process:
- An Expert (one might call her a Content Maven) Writes or Creates something interesting and puts it online (creating the critical component of any online ideavirus: the link)
- A Link Maven comes across the link, and blogs it to their site
- A Connector finds the link and blogs it to their site (or the aforementioned Link Maven has Connector-like traffic levels)
- The link starts to Tip within the weblog community
- The link Tips beyond the weblog community, as the rest of us find out about it
Advertisers think about banner-ad campaigns as a way to carpetbomb their audience with ads. But in a world where ideas and links can Tip so dramatically, perhaps it makes sense for them to revise their thinking. Or as Malcolm wrote in Seth's foreward:
Advertisers spent the better part of the 20th century trying to control and measure and manipulate the spread of information—to count the number of eyes and ears that they could reach with a single message.
But this [ideavirus] notion says that the most successful ideas are those that spread and grow because of the customer’s relationship to other customers—not the marketer’s to the customer.
Understanding Link Mavens and Connectors can let you tap this viral power, and infect the weblog world with your ideas! If you're lucky, your ideas will spread beyond weblogs: not only through high-traffic sites, but through Google. As we've seen before, Google loves link-rich weblogs... so your efforts will ripple beyond the weblog community into the web-at-large.
"[via
seblogging]
I've got to read this book. This article reinforces, among other things, my recent feelings about citation of weblog sources. I can post a blurb from someone's site without giving credit to the site that pointed me there, but doesn't that, in the purest of senses, constitute a sort of meme plagarism? At the very least, it keeps the reader from knowing how you came about the information, and the ability to make processes transparent is, IMHO, one of the most valuable aspects of a weblogging community.
So are we talking about a Blog Style Manual (ala Strunk & White)? Is the medium too young to attempt such a thing? Who has the authority/respect to begin? What might entries look like?
6:22:38 PM 
