How memes go viral

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17581-infectious-people-spread-memes-across-the-web.html

by nreece • 17 years ago

3 4 17 years ago

idlewords2• 17 years ago

"The way that certain images, videos or concepts can suddenly spread like wildfire across the web, using email and social websites to propagate, is one of online culture's most unique phenomena."

Yes, a phenomenon so unique we can only compare it to two other kinds of natural phenomena in THE SAME SENTENCE.

eru• 17 years ago

Perhaps I am too dumb. But I only spotted `wildfire' in this sentence.

idlewords2• 17 years ago

This is the first sentence in an article about 'viral memes', so I'm assuming 'propagate' refers to that metaphor.

embeddedradical• 17 years ago

they discovered that people vary in how much and how quickly they share information, and they also discovered that people who share information quickly and most of the time (infectious people), spread memes faster.

they might as well have discovered that water is wet.

i say this in reaction to the information in the article about professional people being surprised at this, and those being surprised that the data shows that people who spread information more so, spread memes faster. that's not a surprise at all.

How memes go viral

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