Zipf’s Law – Winner Takes All
“We Live In A Winner-Take-Almost-All World…….Busy people don’t have time to look at every painting. They only have room in their overcrowded, media-hyped brains for a few paintings. …..there’s only room for one “most
famous painting in the world” and the safe choice is the Mona Lisa…..
There’s a name for this effect. It’s called Zipf’s law, after George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), a philologist and professor at Harvard University. He discovered that the most popular wordin the English language (“the”) is used ten times more than the tenth most popular word, 100 times more than the 100th most popular word and 1,000 times more than the 1,000th
most popular word.”
From Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin
