Why do we connect to people?

It’s because of our brains.

The brain is as a large network of approximately 100 billion interconnected nodes. Information is accessed through physical connections between nerve cells or neurons for short. And every cell can have up to 10,000 connections to other neurons. If you think about it; the amount of possible connections are staggering.

Though the information is non-physical it gets stored between these neurons on a physical level. Just like data on our hard-drives.

The connections between neurons determine the type of information.
Some neurons have stronger connections than other neurons and thus the information is reflected through the paths that are created between them.
Strong connections are accessed more frequently etc.

That said, the information is a network by itself and contains links to other networks of information. Thereby the brain is inherently prismatic. Its networked physicality is reflected through it.

Analogously to the brain; there is “the internet”.  It’s man made and through it’s topology, behavior and usage it can be considered a reflection of the human brain.  The network is a natural phenomenon and innately fractal where the whole contains a reduced size copy of itself.

In theory each individual is able to connect to millions of others individuals but in fact the average connectivity is much and much lower. It’s not only about the amount of connections but also the strength and type of connections we create that are important.

In doing so we gradually shape the internet by our connections.

And it’s all about “connectedness”. Connecting to others and more importantly, others, connecting to you.

So how do we measure connectivity and what can you do to increase it?

Simply stated: just sit on a heap of  “popular” information and have as many people as possible link to it and pass through it and a couple of things to consider below;

1. Establishing an identity through a blog or a website and be discoverable.  Create links from your blog to the online profiles.
   For example a link I created on my blog to my twitter profile: <a href=”http://twitter.com/daveligthart” rel=”me” title=”twitter profile of dave ligthart” target=”_blank”>twitter</a> . Be sure to include the ‘rel=”me”’ attribute. This allows google to automatically create a social graph for you.
2. Enable others to find you through common connections. Be an active participant in the social media platform you engage in.
3. Influence, create awareness for your blog, write articles, engage into community forums, discussion boards, social media platforms, create video’s etc. And think about what you’re doing, how and especially why you do it? And … focus on a singular subject.
4. Backlinks, have people link back to your blog without the rel=”nofollow” attribute, <a href=”” rel=”external” title=”optimization keywords here”></a>.
5. The internet is reciprocal by nature. You can ask people personally to place a link back to you but that’s a grinding effort. Your blog needs to be cultivated and motivate people to link back themselves.
6. Engagement: give visitors the opportunity to engage into conversation with you and let them create unique content for your blog. It can be as simple as adding a comment to an article.
7. Measurement; we want to measure how well we’re doing. I’ve created a WordPress plugin named WP-Stats-Dashboard which displays connectivity from different social media sources; google social graph, feedburner, twitter, linkedin, backtype etc…And stores all these different types of social metrics data and shows these in a trend chart.
8. Even so, optimization takes time dedication and hard work.