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● Absent ties lack substantial significance and so pass no
meaningful information. Examples are "nodding" relationships
between people living on the same street, or the "tie", for

example, to a frequent vendor one would buy from.
Furthermore, the fact that two people may know each other by
name does not necessarily qualify the existence of a weak tie. If

their interaction is negligible the tie may be absent.

● Structural holes in the network: (Burt, 1992). The idea of
structural holes talks to the informational advantage enjoyed by
a person that bridges two or more tight social groupings each

characterized by strong ties many of which are informationally
redundant. The bridge person can act as a gatekeeper or broker
and chose to transfer valuable information between groups or

not; or combine the information for their own purposes (e.g.,
entrepreneurial action).

● Scale-free Networks: The size distribution of nodes in a
network structure always tends to a power law. A Pareto

distribution (the 80/20 rule) and Zipf’s Rank-Size Law of city
size are examples of the power law with a few number of nodes
(in the network case) possessing the bulk of all links. This

distribution is called scale-free because it exists regardless of the
number of nodes in a network. The power law distribution lies at
the heart of the Google search engine with the importance of a

node being measured by the number of links it possesses.

● Small-World Phenomenon: Originated by 1998, Duncan J.
Watts and Steven Strogatz of Cornell University. This
idea showed that, by adding a few random links to a network, the

longest direct path between any two nodes can be dropped from
very long to very short. The research was originally inspired by
Watts' efforts to understand the synchronization of cricket
chirps, which show a high degree of coordination over long

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