In his book The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell analyzes how ideas spread in the society. He writes that mavens (experts who love to teach) and connectors (people who know a lot of other people) are especially important for how fast an idea gets propagated through society. Examples in the blog world would be Matt Haughey with his PVRblog is a Tivo maven and Glen Reynolds is clearly a connector as noted in the Tipping Blog. There John Heiler also concludes and I agree, that online the lines between connectors and mavens are blurring.
One of the new features of Technorati is to show the link cosmos not only to Weblogs/Webpages, but to key words/topics. It dawned on me, that Technorati can analyze the link cosmos to find the mavens/connectors to every topic in their database.
That is a marketeers dream come true. In his presentation David used the example of a Hockey fan being on a business trip to San Jose and getting a discount ticket offer to the Sharks game that night on his cell phone. In that case he argued, that the fan would be happy to get this offer.
It will be interesting to see what David and his people will create out of this information, whom they give access for what purposes. I just hope they stick to their "Be of service" to the enduser promise.
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