Using a Model of Social Dynamics to Predict Popularity of News points to Hochheiser and Schniederman’s reader to leader theory in some ways. In this paper Kristina Lerman and Tad Hogg study the voting and interaction behavior of users on Digg.
A small number of users dominate the activity on the site, and receive most of the attention of other users.
In this case, on Digg, a small group of people act as leaders, as do they on Wikipedia according to Hochheiser. Lerman also found that sites that initially get many votes do not accumulate many more further on. It seems that viralirty does not exist in the Digg system like we would expect. However, Digg is potentially a viral seed.
Leaders potentially start on Digg and as they “vote on the story, it becomes visible to their own fans through the friends interface.” From there, the content may expand to broader networks with more users who act as collaborators and contributors.
The strength of social influence is measured in terms of the proportion of initial votes that can be made via the friends interface: those coming from the fans of the submitter and previous voters. Social influence during the early voting period and the final number of votes a story receives are inversely correlated.
What we can learn here is that initially, it seems that it takes getting content to the leaders so they will contribute to their other leader and readers which then, and only then, will traffic to the content increase. Earlier this year I blogged asking if it was knowledge or was it the network that is power. Some signs point to network.