They actually used some online networks for their simulations:
"We investigate (i) the friendship network between 3.4 million members of the LiveJournal.com community [15], (ii) the network of email contacts in the Computer Science Department of the University College London (Zhou, S., private communication), (iii) the contact network of inpatients (CNI) collected from hospitals in Sweden [16], and (iv) the network of actors who have co-starred in movies labeled by imdb.com as adult [17]"
They found some rules about how the structure of the network influences the spreading ability of each node. As you may suspect, they find highly connected individuals aren't necessarily the best spreaders.
Comments
Here's a link to some interesting theoretical work by Hernan Makse titled "Identifying Influential Spreaders in Complex Networks."
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1001/1001.5285v2.pdf
They actually used some online networks for their simulations:
"We investigate (i) the friendship network between 3.4 million members of the LiveJournal.com community [15], (ii) the network of email contacts in the Computer Science Department of the University College London (Zhou, S., private communication), (iii) the contact network of inpatients (CNI) collected from hospitals in Sweden [16], and (iv) the network of actors who have co-starred in movies labeled by imdb.com as adult [17]"
They found some rules about how the structure of the network influences the spreading ability of each node. As you may suspect, they find highly connected individuals aren't necessarily the best spreaders.