Monday, March 9, 2009

Just nod if you can hear me

Over the weekend, I learned of two additional readers of this here screed. I knew of four readers previously, which means that the number of confirmed readers has jumped by 50%, over a weekend when I didn't post. Not bad.
So, if the six confirmed readers each told six friends a week, and those friends told six other friends, how many weeks would it take to reach the world population of 6 or so billion? Well, some considerations:
  1. We've pretty much all got the same friends and there's no guarantee of uniqueness in the 6/week requirement. Our little sub-net is well connected, but connections to other sub-nets might be harder to reach. Basically, within a week or two, we'd all be recommending this blog to each other, but distant lands like Russia, Botswana and the Mid-West might not have been reached at all.
  2. Social capital is an issue: this blog is lame, so there's a valid concern that recommending it to a friend might suggest to that friend that you too are lame. This concern might hamper the 6/week endeavor.
  3. It's one thing with like 5 readers, but there might be a threshold audience size at which I'd be too embarrassed by my own content. I'd have to choose between starting to make sense, or quitting out of shame. I'm pretty shameless, so we've got a ways to go, but I'd probably freak out long before our little mathematical growth experiment was able to recruit the entire population of, e.g., China.
Anyhow, I guess this has been my way of saying welcome to all new readers, confirmed and otherwise. See you around.

p.s. BFS ♥

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Now I'm afraid to comment on this post because my friends will then think I'm lame. Luckily, the only way they will catch me is if they also read your blog so I can call them out.