Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
Clay Shirky,
Shirky.Com,
Feb 10, 2003
This article is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the economics of online content. The thesis of the article is this: "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." What results is what is called a "power law distribution," an ordering of popularity such that a small percentage of the sites attract a large percentage of the readers. In support of this thesis, the author examines measurements of blog popularity, inbound links, Yahoo! Groups member lists, and Livejournal users' lists of friends. Also worth examining is this list that takes advantage of this metric to discover new and interesting blogs.
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