Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forJanuary 18th, 2004 | back to home

18 January 2004
Filed under:Weblogs at6:12 pm

Clay Shirky has posted about the inequalities of popularity in weblogs and provides a useful analysis of possible solutions (all of which involve costs and would require a lot of cooperation and altruistic behaviour among bloggers or blog software designers). This has sparked a lot of discussion in the posts following. Nothing may come of it but at least the issue is being talked about.

I don’t have a firm view on this myself except to observe that a) perhaps being seen by the most possible people is not necessarily the objective of most bloggers anyway and b) it appears that there is some data to suggest the power law doesn’t necessarily hold “for individual interest sub-groups”:http://modelingtheweb.com/ within the whole ‘blogosphere’.