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Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has written an excellent article entitled "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." Simply put, diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality: "A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on." A must read for anyone interested in the statistics, fairness, and power relations of blogging."
For something with a real distribution (either bell curve, or in this case power), a REALLY small number of datapoints shows you the pattern, if the datapoints were drawn randomly.
I would guess if you picked just a few 100, the graph would look the same.
In this case, what is more suspect is that we have inclusion of the biggest, most popular weblogs, which implies they were included by hand. Therefore the sample is probably not random.
In addition, there is no definitive list or way to calculate all blogs, so by defenition his sample comes from a subset of all blogs that were in some way listed or linked to. There are probably a whole strata of blogs that were guaranteed not to be in the analysis, because they werent included in whatever source material he drew his sample from.