Just the other day I wrote about The Tipping Point – while managing to spell the bloody name wrong in the title – and was thinking aloud about how it should be revised to take into account how much more connected people are now the Internet is more widespread.

By coincidence, the book I am now reading (Faster by James Gleick – the chap who popularised the chaos theory) mentions this connectedness, but phrases it a whole lot better than I did.

In past times, even in the most crowded city, we lived close enough to only a few people to, say, read their journals or track the temperature of their hot tubs. Now, in hordes, they put that information on-line. The multiplication of information pathways leads to positive feedback effects in the nature of frenzies.

And that was back in 1999, virtually pre-historic in terms of the mass access to the Internet now, and more to the point a whole year before The Tipping Point. (And “frenzy” does suggest the concept of something past its tipping point doesn’t it?)

If James Gleick had noticed this effect in 1999 you would think that Malcolm Gladwell might have made some mention of it a year later in his book. Even so the book would still need a revised edition to reflect the exponential growth in Internet use, to the point where it may well be close to being more influential in promoting trends than other media or personal contact.

But its interesting how often that happens, that you read a book and see connections and similarities to the last one you read. On one extended business trip, or maybe a holiday, I took three books away and all turned out to have the same theme of a man looking up ex-girlfriends in some sort of search for a clue to the nature of his own personality. I can still remember that coincidence, even if I can’t remember what the books were. (One was probably High-Fidelity and another may well have been a David Lodge – Therapy probably but I haven’t a clue what the third was.)