Britt Blaser, a community thinker who consistently penetrates the thicket of theory to deliver plain commonsense language, has an exceptional posting on the problem we've been building BuzzLogic to address: Five principles for understanding the flow of influence in networked conversations.
In a nutshell (but go eat the meat of Britt's ideas):
1. The size of your audience confers limited power2. A network's value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)
3. Network nodes are significant only when they're verbose
4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes
5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most
As David Weinberger writes of Britt's posting, "The points are engaged with one another and with their readers (as Chris Anderson makes clear in his nuanced book, The Long Tail). Yes, Long Tails are conversations, too."
