I wanted to follow up my last post about Power Law with some quick thoughts about Power Law and the blogosphere.
Clay Shirky and Jason Kottke had interesting posts about this in February of 2003. They are a little dated, in terms of blog posts, but relevant to the discussion at hand.
My understanding is that both posts were written in response to an outbreak of lamenting the rise of “A-list bloggers” at that time. In his blog, Shirky links to this post, illustrating said lamenting. It seems that people were trying to find reasons why this phenomena of powerful bloggers was happening.
Shirky writes this in response to the discussion, specifically, that some bloggers had ‘sold out’:
What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
And:
Inequality occurs in large and unconstrained social systems for the same reasons stop-and-go traffic occurs on busy roads, not because it is anyone’s goal, but because it is a reliable property that emerges from the normal functioning of the system. The relatively egalitarian distribution of readers in the early years had nothing to do with the nature of weblogs or webloggers. There just weren’t enough blogs to have really unequal distributions. Now there are.
This really brings us back to Manuel Lima’s question at the end of his TED talk: is there a universal structure?
And, for more about Kottke and Shirky’s posts and the relation of scarcity of time to Power Law distributions, see this post from Amber’s Blog.
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