Chances are, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve participated in a spontaneous mass audience on the World Wide Web. Someone somewhere decides to share something that catches your interest: a home video, say, of the Indian Ocean tsunami taking out a beach resort. At first that sort of offering gathers an audience slowly. A few people send a link to friends, but soon the links become part of a positive feedback loop, and before long big media news sites have noticed the file, and the initial cluster of visitors becomes a swarm.
That cycle is a ubiquitous part of the Web’s information ecosystem, and many different terms have been coined to describe it, including tipping point, idea virus, and peer-to-peer marketing. The fundamental principle is that buzz spreads in a distributed, rather than centralized, fashion. Instead of turning to The New York Times or the network news to ...
