The way that certain images, videos or concepts can suddenly spread like wildfire across the web, using email and social websites to propagate, is one of online culture's most unique phenomena. Now Spanish researchers claim to have found a way to accurately predict how quickly and widely new "memes", as they are called, will spread. The ability to forecast this "viral" behaviour would be of great interest to sociologists and marketeers, among others.
The secret, they say, is to recognise the fact that people vary in how "infectious" they are when it comes to sharing content online. While some people pass on things they receive right away, others do so after some delay, or not at all.
Medical models
The viral spread of information online has conventionally been modelled using epidemiological tools developed to analyse the spread of biological viruses.
One of the concepts borrowed is that of an infection's R0, or basic reproductive number, which describes how many other people someone with the virus can be expected to infect. Knowing the R0 number help predict the likelihood and extent of real life epidemics, such as H1N1 swine flu.
Rememebr that models that apply the idea to online information can only indicate whether an internet meme is likely to be successful or to die out quickly, says Esteban Moro at the Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain.
Moro, working with José Luis Iribarren at IBM in Madrid, used IBM's company email newsletter to show the importance of variations between people's infectiousness in propagating memes online.
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