The Last Best Swindle Royal Flush

Networks of people by PeopleNology Gregory Bodenhamer
People are connected together with one another through social and other relationships. Spreading ideas means first of all getting people to connect together and secondly to talk about your idea.
The rule of six
In a classic experiment, psychology professor Stanley Milgram sent letters to acquaintances with the name of another person elsewhere in the world that they did not know, and with the simple instructions to pass the letter on to someone who 'might know' the target person. His remarkable findings was that, in most cases, the letter found its target within about six 'hops' between people.
This experiment has been repeated more recently using the internet and email, and has come up with the same conclusions: we are only about six steps away from anyone else in the world.

Category: General

Memes and viruses
Richard Dawkins, in his Darwinian masterpiece The Selfish Gene, noted how ideas spread like viruses, almost having a life of their own. An effective virus spreads by infecting almost everyone it meets. Likewise, ideas that diffuse faster are infectious, such that people are fascinated by them and are motivated to pass them on to others.
PeopleNology

Category: General

The tipping point
Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book, The Tipping Point, how, when enough people know about an idea, it suddenly takes off. Everett Rogers noted that this point is around 25% of a population. The implication is that for you to get your idea widely adopted, the hardest part is over once you have got a quarter of the people bought into the idea.

PeopleNology

Category: General