Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Power laws and blogs
I ran into an interesting article by Clay Shirky here. The article explores the blog ecosystem under the light of power laws and social networks. This is a snippet of the article:
Some claims are intriguing.
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.
Some claims are intriguing.
