NYT article: good article about the 'cumulative advantage'.
"The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like,
differences in popularity are subject to what is called âcumulative
advantage,â? or the ârich get richerâ? effect. This means that if one
object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the
right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result,
even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially
enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors
â a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous âbutterfly
effectâ? from chaos theory."
# Apr 17, 2007