I am featured on paper.li, or, er, my upstream is

Paper.li is self-described in this way: 

paper.li organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to read newspaper-style format. Newspapers can be created for any Twitter user, list or #tag.

Jamie Burke pinged me today, pointing out that my paper.li ‘daily journal’ is at the top of the service’s featured page.

I don’t know how the featured list is composed, but It’s kind of an odd feeling to be on the list since paper.li is simply ‘journalizing’ things that people I follow are pointing to. It’s not my own writing abilities, here, or reasoning. It’s my curatorial ability: I am following people whose links turn out to be interesting to others. So my upstream is being featured on paper.li, really.

Wait a minute! That’s the whole thesis of this piece I wrote not too long ago, called It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence. I make the case that the people that are likely to be the most influential aren’t the obviously most popular ones:

The most connected people in a social network — those with the highest number of incoming and outgoing connections — have high eigenvalues. These eigenvalues can be calculated — like Google’s PageRank algorithm — by weighting the value of each connection based on the eigenvalue of the originator.

But this research [Maksim Kitsak, et al] suggests that a different way to measure the centrality might be more useful in determining how much throw weight a person actually has. Betweenness is a measure of how short are the chains that connects a person to the totality of the network. Like PageRank, betweenness is recursive: the people with the highest betweenness are likely to be connected to other people with high betweenness.

This means people are influential because they are connected to many influential people. But influence doesn’t seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It’s a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

So, it’s not who you know it’s where you know. It’s where you are situated in the network, and not just in the limited sense of how many immediate contacts you have.

My hunch is that my upstream is interesting to people because I am following people who themselves are connected to very connected people, people from a wide range of social scenes.