PreferentialAttachment

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A mechanism proposed by [Barabasi et al] to explain the PowerLaw distribution in the connectedness of web sites (or other domains of social popularity).

From the paper:

: "Similarly, a newly created Web page will be more likely to include links to well-known popular documents with already-high connectivity, and a new manuscript is more likely to cite a well-known and thus much-cited paper than its less-cited and consequently less-known peer. These examples indicate that the probability with which a new vertex connects to the existing vertices is not uniform; there is a higher probability that it will be linked to a vertex that already has a large number of connections."

One social balancing force is that links to obscure sources are more useful to readers than links to sources they've already read.

PreferentialAttachment constructs AdoringFans.

References

A.-L. Barabási, and R. Albert, Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science, 286, 509-512 (1999).

Isn't the PowerLaw theory well established in all freely competitive systems with PreferentialAttachment? I'm sure you can find many papers on it in economics theory. After all, capitalism may make the expenditure of capital more efficient, but a FreeMarket? will concentrate wealth along a PowerLaw distribution as well (ClassStriation). This is why it is necessary to create a counterbalancing public force (like the government) to re-equitize opportunities. This is loosely described here as SocialCapitalism. There are undoubtedly many such examples, not just related to WebLogs. -- SunirShah

CategoryGraphTheory

PreferentialAttachment

References

Discussion