Hush those Hush Puppy stories

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Is the Tipping Point Toast? Trendsetting
In the past few years, Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo, has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random.

Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure. "It just doesn't work," Watts says, "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there." And this is not, he argues, mere academic whimsy. He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people - and ignoring Influentials altogether.


Mad, mad world #894226

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Copyright Now Extends To Cease-And-Desist Letters?
Apparently even the cease-and-desist letters sent to sites to inform them to stop violating copyrights are now - copyrighted. TechDirt is reporting an update to a case they first covered back in October where a lawyer tried to claim his cease-and-desist letters fell under a copyright, and thus no one could legally reprint them without his express permission. The people’s advocacy group, Public Citizen, saw this as a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, and moved to stop it. Yet from the look of a press release put out yesterday by the lawyer in question, it seems the judge agreed the man’s claim. The publication of a letter can now result statutory damages for as much as $150,000 per occurrence plus attorneys’ fees that can average $750,000 through trial.

Popularity Culture

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Former New Republic Writer Charges Social Web Users As ‘Destructive’
Lee Siegal talks with Jeffrey Trachtenberg about the “malicious” thuggery with which a sizable segment of the social Web’s population collectively conduct themselves in a “destructive” fashion. The author claims “aspects of the Web…devalue serious though,” and says “popular culture has given way to popularity culture.”