Image from kottke.org, from a post on Weblogs and Power Laws Some observers have noticed that the popularity of blogs follows the power law distribution, i.e. the graph that you see above. This graph was plotted from the Top 100 most linked to weblogs in Technorati on 24 Jan 2003. As you can see, there is a vast difference between the #1 popular (at 6000 links) and the #8 (1000 links), for example. However, #50 doesn't show a lot of difference from #100. This concept is similar to the 80/20 rule, i.e. 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. Here are some interesting quotes from Clay Shirky's article of Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality . "Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality." "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 syst...
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