I can remember when The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell was first published in 2000, and there was a lot of buzz about it, so I don’t know why it took me so long to get round to reading it.

But now I have read it and I am a little underwhelmed by it. Its not that its a bad book or anything like that; just that it did not quite deliver what I was expecting by the end of it. I think that the last line of the introduction (“And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?”) led me to expect more specific conclusions which, on reflection, is really too much to ask.

One of the pleasures of reading this type of non-fiction book is in getting all the good bits of scientific research without having to wade through all the boring bits. Instead of having to read dozens of pages of densely-packed type describing an experiment you just get the fascinating results with only as much background as is needed to understand it – and many of the studies quoted do have remarkable results from which totally counter-intuitive conclusions are drawn.

This book draws on such diverse sources as studies of STDs in Baltimore, the Stanford prison experiment, Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, Sesame Street, the rise in popularity of Hush Puppies and the broken windows theory of public disorder and crime (which I may well write about separately at the weekend).

For some reason the best example of what a tipping point is was not in the main text, but tucked away in the endnotes – a hypothetical case of how a 24-hour flu would spread in New York. With its demonstration of how a small change within a narrow range can have enormous effects it reminded me of chaos theory, but with a little refinement: whereas chaos theory is all about sensitivity to starting conditions, this was about how that sensitivity increases at a specific point. Maybe thats a poor analogy actually – the case studies and examples are not at all stochastic.

By the end of the book I realised why it was that I was less enthused about it than all the reviewers back in 2000, and its obvious in retrospect – its not 2000 any more. The theory behind the book identifies a number of factors which can affect the spread of an idea or product. The first of these is ‘the power of the few’ and it explains how three types of person can aid the spread of cultural or social epidemics – salesmen, connectors and mavens.

Back in 2000 the Internet existed, but it is only recently, with the explosion of connectivity, blogging, and communtity applications like Flickr or Amazon’s reviews and lists or wikis and so on that we see ideas spread so quickly now (just look how quickly a meme can spread across blogs for example).

I realised that, although only 5 years old, the book is, in a way, out-of-date. The concept is as valid, but the absence of web- or e-mail-based examples is glaring. I kept thinking that future instances of trends taking off after a tipping point are very likely to be influenced heavily by online word-of-mouth rather than the traditional methods, and the book urgently needs a new edition to take account of the new paradigms.

When Gladwell is describing the personality types, I could think of examples of them all over the net. There are a number of websites which could count as mavens – most specialist bulletin boards really and just looking at the various blogrolls you can see how many people must now count as connectors who would never have done so otherwise.

And it is the rise of blogs, personal homepages and wikis which is doing this. The BBC News website may be a good source of authoritative information, but by its very official-ness it can be less influential than something like Fark in spreading an idea or opinion.

Having said all that, the book not only occupied a few train journeys, but it provoked me to thinking about such abstract concepts, extrapolating from what is in the text and it is not every book which does that, so I would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone.