What made the Medici family so influential?
Simplifying Complexity
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Diffusion Centrality
The Medici influence was about getting the information to spread throughout the network quickly. And so it turns out that these people are well connected in terms of having friends who then can spread information and those friends can spread information. They look sort of like the center of a tree in some way, right? It's spreading out via branches. When you actually look at the networks, you can almost eyeball. Oh, yeah, those are going to be the diffusion central people. You can actually spot them. In some cases, you might find that those people tend to be the same. So it could be that Cosimo was a really good diffuser, but they can be very different.
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