Bob Metcalfe’s law states that the overall usefulness of a network is
proportional to the square of the number of people connected to it
(because each of the N users can make N-1 connections). I was thinking
of this while listening to a radio programme this morning about the
global dominance of English as a language.
A similar multiplying effect must occur with databases on the net. The
more data a particular database contains, the more people will use and
add to it. The marvellous Internet Movie
Database was an early example.
Now, I wonder if this one
will ever really get going….
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