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22 July 2009 11:00 AM
"Don't Blog Anything With More Than Half A Million Hits"
Joshua Davis on how trends kill themselves:
It happens to everyone: You come across something hilarious online and want to pass it along. But are you hopping on a trend that's past its expiration date? Answering that question isn't as simple as you'd think. Just ask Jonah Berger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who has been studying how trends rise and fall for almost a decade. In his most recent work, Berger looked at changing fashions in baby names. Examining a century's worth of data, he and his colleagues discovered that the quicker a name came into vogue, the quicker it went out. Because fads are perceived negatively, parents tend to shun names that have seen a sharp increase in popularity. "If it came out of nowhere, it might not persist that long," he says.The Dave Matthews Band has suffered mightily due to a similar phenomenon.
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