Eric Reasons

---150 Connections: The difference between a Community and an Audience--- I found myself in a conversation with friend and sometimes mentor, Nathan Hughes ( @ndh313 ), about the upper bound of one's social connections. Back in the 90's Robin Dunbar proposed an upper limit of around 150 real social connections (knowing who a person is and what their relationship is to you). Scientists have recently used Twitter as a laboratory to confirm that this number holds true , even with all the recent advances in social networking technology. This number has also been confirmed by actual practice throughout the range of human experiences , from hunter-gatherer societies to corporate organizations, to the U.S. military. In our new social media landscape, this limit seems to manifest itself in two interesting effects: Most of you have probably already observed the first effect, and it is unlikely to surprise you: those of us who follow hundreds or thousands on Twitter or Facebook will...

I've written before about the compromise we tacitly agree to when amateurs take over the roles formerly held by professionsals . The Internet promotes this takeover by lowering the cost of production and transmission to near zero for nearly every user, for everything from words (blogs) to pictures (Flickr) to video (YouTube). As Clay Shirky put it so well : As freedom to produce increases, average quality necessarily goes down. For example: Thanks to Flickr, we now have access to a mind-boggling array of beautiful pictures, but that's partly because we simply have access to a mind boggling array of pictures, period . Some of these, of course, are beautiful; but there are a lot more of Aunt Bettie's 43rd picture of a bundt cake than of an Annie Leibovitz Rolling Stone cover. It is at this point that many people interject: "This is the problem with the internet! It's full of crap!" Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, an...