Curating the Curators

See on Scoop.it – Things I grab here and there

If you spend any time looking at networks, one of the things you’ll find is that the rich tend to get richer. As people build lots of followers (or “circlers” as their known on Google+), the probability that additional followers follow them increases. There are lots of explanations for this, but one important one centers on the notion of “social proof.” That’s what happens when we think to ourself, “boy, so-and-so sure has a lot of followers – they must have something important to say.”
There are lots of problems with this “rich get richer” phenomenon, one of which popped up for me this weekend, almost by accident. I had decided earlier that I was wanted to identify a group of people who were sharing interesting content, but who hadn’t yet built big followings on Google+. After a bunch of work to identify this group, I then shared the results in what’s known as a “circle share” on Google+. The results were quite positive. Several hundred people added these individuals to their own circles, which is great visibility for this group – a nice opportunity to get their content in front of more people.

See on www.alchemyofchange.net