Colleague, researcher, and great guy Tere Vadén (with Juha Suoranta) have new work available:

WIKIWORLD
Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media

Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén
University of Tampere, Finland

Novelty and collective attention

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.

Novelty and collective attention -- Wu and Huberman 104 (45): 17599 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

Kevin Kelly -- 1,000 True Fans

There are two ways to succeed in the complicated, burdensome flowless interrupting world we’ve made. Two ways to Get Things Done; anybody telling you there’s only one is selling something. Two ways to satisfice and maybe even to excel.

Notional Slurry » There are exactly two ways: one, and many

It occurred to me that visitors and scholars might benefit from an ongoing list of panarchy examples, so here goes.

Panarchy is in action when groups of people perform collective action in parallel to or in spite of hierarchical organizations. Panarchy is in action when:

• global social networks and movements act on behalf of some cause, from land mines to environmentalism to anti-war protests.
• people share URLs and tags on social bookmarking sites like http://del.icio.us.