(2003-02-11) Blog Power Laws

Ross Mayfield on Clay Shirky's piece on the BlogWeb ecosystem exhibiting Power Law characteristics.

• Clay: At some point (probably one we've already passed), weblog technology will be seen as a platform for so many forms of publishing, filtering, aggregation, and syndication that blogging will stop referring to any particularly coherent activity. The term 'blog' will fall into the middle distance, as 'home page' and 'portal' have, words that used to mean some concrete thing, but which were stretched by use past the point of meaning. This will happen when head and tail of the power law distribution become so different that we can't think of J. Random Blogger and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit as doing the same thing. (He then segments the curve into blog-as-mainstream-media, Blogging Classic, and conversational blogs, all with inverse relations between number of readers and intensity of relationship.)

• Ross: The Distribution Of Choice maps to three distinct networks, each optimized for a different time investment to realize relationships and each with a different distribution:... the Political Network (Mass Media, the Market), the Social Network (150 people you'd want to drink with), and the Creative Network (12 people you do work with: This Creative Network is an internal network, that feeds off of the external network (Social Network) for new ideas but is optimized to produce.).

• Steven Johnson has some thoughts about how one might try to spread out the curve. Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don't have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don't have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose.

• Joseph Reagle on Popularity Mobility (like Income Mobility). This sketch isn't that much better than an anecdote but it does at least give me a sense that while the power law is relevant to the blogging, there is - presently - significant upward and downward movement within the EcoSystem.

• Doc Searls questions the relevance of Clay's points. We can make sports out of anything... The inequality Clay talks about - the fact that some of us are graced with more links and readers than others - is of a purely numerical sort. It says nothing about why people write blogs, and why readers read blogs... I also don't think of my readers as an "audience." That is a power trip.

• A question I ask on the BlogWeb page is why the heck any of this matters? If we just want to even things out, how about we ask everyone to have a random Blog Roll? Something here just smells like it's more about competing for Whuffie than anything else. Which seems like a distraction...

Aug08'2004: Cosma Shalizi shows that it's not a PowerLaw. Now I turn to my main alternative, the most boring possible rival to the power-law within the field of heavy-tailed distributions, namely, the log-normal. Just as the Gaussian distribution is the limit of what you get by summing up many independent quantities, the log-normal is the limit of multiplying independent quantities.