But i think rethinking of the concept of spreading is needed, since we still think of that as to “spreading to the masses” – but what type of mass are we talking about when looking at the long tail?

@rhrbjorn i think that the word viral is often misunderstood, just because a video gets a lot of views, does not make it viral. Viral is things (a lot more than films) spreading from people to people. A lot of views generated on youtube through placement on the front page of youtube, is just the same as pushing your video through a broadcasting channel. Looking at a site like http:/viralvideochart.com , you will see that the videos are not rated by number of views but rather number of tweets and blog posts about and with the video.
But its an interesting subject, and its a subject I will write a more thorough blog post about soon.

@ christian, I do agree on the first part, its what I call “social media is a rocket up the ass of the theory”.
Malcolm also befriended me, but I suspect that profile to be fake. ;)
And for the last part of your comment I really agree ;) Here in the beginning its hard to see how we ass individual can grasp that we can be connected through networks to a larger sum off people than ever before – its a very interesting subject.

What strikes me however is that the assumptions have changed; does it any longer make sense to have networks of only 200, when examples show that by using apps like Facebook and Twitter people are capable of having increasingly larger networks? One could easily say that this kind of “network” is not having the same value as interpersonal ones before the advent of social media – but I beg to differ, as social media to a very large extent is able to grasp being interconnected in a different way than required in “the old days”.

It also looks like it is the recommendation system not networks that decides when or if a clip goes viral .