Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Clay Shirky is going to talk about "Weblog Ecosystem: Power Laws, Fake Estates, Weblogs and the Media." He defines weblogs as anyting that is simple enough to enable anyone to publish on the web, every day if she or he wants to. (Not a close enough quote, unfortunately.) He's talking about power laws.

Blogs form loose conversations. Link density grows according to Metcalfe's Law. (Metcalfe is in the audience; he's one of the founders of PopTech.) Preferential connectivity. Sites can scan the weblog world and see the links. "Link structure is a proxy for audience." That is, if there are lots of inbound links, there are probably lots of readers.

Clay in February checked Technorati to see the distribution of links and found a power law curve: a very rapid collapse and then a long, slow tail. (Clay says that Jason Kottke had the same idea at the same time.) This is definitely not a bell curve. Most bloggers have less than average traffic. Half the link density is taken up by just 5% of the weblogs. And adding more bloggers makes the curve even steeper: if you start a blog, you are likely to link to one of the top weblogs but they are quite unlikely to link to you.

The links in the tail tend to be among people linking to one another, the pattern of a dinner party. At LiveJournal, people aren't posting in public; they're posting to friends. "You could go down to the mall and sit in the food court, and listen in on a conversation among a bunch of teenagers ... but you're the weird one, not them.")

The links at the top form a broadcast pattern. Glenn Reynolds can't link back to everyone who links to him. He has too many readers to be able to open up comments.

These patterns apply outside of the world of weblogs. Power laws apply in many places. E.g., of word frequencies follows a power law.

The 20th century was the century of mass media. We're comfortable with that. Weblogs are a rapid "do-over" of the 21st century. It's the first medium we've seen go from zero to important. But there are three differences from mass media:

1. No central control

2. No special technology - a teenager bitching about his parents and Glenn Reynolds use the same technology. The same technology scales across 7 orders of magnitude.

3. No scarcity. It's "fake estate" not "real estate." Construction increases the size of the system rather than taking some of it out of circulation.

The differences among the patterns of weblog connectivity are all social differences, not technological ones. So, what does this mean for us?

First, "Broadcast happens." Even though blogs are two-way, the broadcast pattern has re-emerged. "The broadcast pattern arises out of the social wiring of large groups of people."

[Yeah but...broadcast reemerges, but it non-broadcast clusters also emerge. That long tail has a lot of people in it. Sorry to be a fanatic, but look at how Dean supporters are organizing themselves. And Clay points to Oprah Winfrey's book clubs as an example of an attempt to put clusters — local book clubs — at the edges of the broadcast spokes.]

Second, "There is an A List (and you're not on it)."

Third, "Freedom vs. Equality." When you increase the freedom in the system, you get imbalances and power curves.

Q: [Me] It's not that broadcast is all there is; the length of the tail shows the importance of non-broadcast.

A: Yes.

Q: How many weblogs will there be?

A: See the Perseus study.

Q: How about the changing role of authority?

A: The next move is to derive expertise from the link structure. It hasn't happened yet but it will because it has to.