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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."
this subject is covered in the book Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who focuses on the prevalence of power laws in web traffic and Internet router connectivity. There are also some pretty good explanations on why this makes the Internet more resilient than a randomly linked network but also more vulnerable to malicious acts. This book was covered on slashdot previously. I found it to be a good read.
With over 4 million weblogs currently how can Shirky base his conclusion on less than a valdi statistical sampling?
you would need at least 200,000 blog sin the data set which only has less than 1,000 thus no conclusions can be made of any value..until he gets more data..
But than agai maybe Shirky did not take stats or survey classes in colleg eot know how to do this properly
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Blogging has become the defacto new media for the Net. Many bloggers themselves are becoming more engrossed into news and media than anything else.
BUT, I have seen a trend lately that I would seriously like to discuss. Some very popular blogs (You know who you are), are blogged so much in a given day that it begs to question exactly what the author does during the rest of his work day, the blogs do claim that the author is living a rather eventful life, but my question is... how does the author have time to blog when he's having this super life?
The concern I have here is the max-headroom syndrom. 90% of the popular blogs out there are run by some syndicated company (such as news corps and so on). They may say that it's run by some individual, but that's not simply possible. The writing is done by teams and they try to influence people on the net using their propagenda.
I'm simply sick of this type of blogging. I have been a techinical blogger since the early 90's and I find that blogs are simply becoming the next domain for media ppl, they are just taking over us.
What do we need? I think it's time for a Union of bloggers, so we can keep track of what blogs are authentic and what is not, I think we need to have some sort of confederation that real bloggers could subscribe to.
Thanks.
James E. Diot
(sorry forgot password -- so anonymous)
I think this boils down to this: do you want to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond? It use to be that the the size of a potential audience (the pond) is restricted to the natural growth rate (eg TV), but with the internet still on growing exponentially in some areas, it'll take a while yet before this happens. So some bloggers get more attention; that doesn't necessarily mean they'll continue to grow - bandwidth costs money, and you've got to find it somewhere. There will be an equilibrium reached eventually, but unless there's some sort of consolidation happening, this will strictly be a grassroot issue. I good example, not necessarily blogging, would be Matt Drudge.
Jason Kottke has posted a similar article about Weblogs and power laws. He points to this thread for getting him thinking--and guesses Shirky was inspired there as well.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Regardless of how much a particular group of people might prefer anarchy to a societal group the chances that such a form of society maintaining that freedom approach 0 quickly. It is inevitable that someone will be called on to make a decision that will effect the rest of the group at some time. That was the fundamental flaw of Marx's theory. Most humans, by nature, need someone to guide and direct their lives. As a society grows, the need for leaders, or elites, grows as well since it would be all-consuming for each person to know each aspect of what was going on in society. Can you image having to understand all the aspects of society and power structure, even in an area as small as a town? While science has developed a chaos theory, social science seems to follow the reverse. It seems that no matter which society you choose to follow it is eventually going to begin to show power difference, class seperation, and disassociated social networks. All in all I found it very intersting how the bell curve was worked into the discussion. Coming from a math/comp sci background and moving to communications I am always looking for a bridge between the two.
I just guess that this might be just a by product of human gatherings, even if not in physical terms.
Paraphrasing Lewis: you can't explain, but it is there. You cannot really tell whether you're in or out, but once you're in (or out, for that matter) you can surely affirm it. Once you get there, you realize that there are more people who is more in than you. If your really in, you wish you were out, because being really in usually is not exciting as you once thought when you were out. You cant draw boundaries, but you know who else is in or out. You can push someone out, but it is really hard to get in. It doesnt matter where you are, but you know, and cant explain
That's a genius!
Remember that pesky Marx? Thesis, Antithesis, and what was that third stage? Get back to me when it isn't a blatant rip-off of an original idea
Which brings up an interesting question. Do you think that a certain amount of disobedience and rebelliousness by the "betas" against the will of the "alphas" is built into our social structures as human animals? Furthermore, is a certain amount of these things crucial to the functioning of our society? Even more, if the government can some day monitor EVERY one of our activities, sucht that we can't get away with anything...will that take a toll on the mass psychology of our society? Will anxiety, depression, and erratic behavior become even more common place?
The conclusion of the article was that the power distribution curve is a random process.
Given that, there is no meaning we can rightfully attach to this effect (or bloggs for that matter) other than how we want to view the situation.
At a higher level this simply means: Do or do not; there is no try.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I don't care WHO reads my journal. My journal is basically for an audience of one...ME. As journals should be. If you like what you read, fine, enjoy. If you don't, you don't.
As far as the "zoo" system...the proof in the pudding is in who has befriended me and who is a "freak" of mine. I basically have a handful of crapflooders as freaks. Whoopee-doo. The folks who have befriended me are with few exceptions people who contribute positively to Slashdot on an ongoing basis.
Sure, I'm not a "superstar" here. Frankly, if nominated for Slashdot superstardom I would not run, and if elected I would not serve. But I try my best to be a good contributor and actually add something to discussions.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Sing along, kids: direct, participatory democracy does not scale.
I've been saying this for years; Clay provides some excellent scientific evidence showing it, and writes about it a whole lot better than I can. Must be why he's further up the curve than I am.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
From, "Tyranny of the Moment" Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Is any of this a suprise to anyone? Haven't we witnessed the same thing with the economic anarchy that we call capitalism? In the free market you have the same thing, with certain people in charge and others clamoring for a few crumbs. The internet and any system that promotes this kind of anarchy will be the same way. That is why we need some kind of democratic structure to be applied, so that the needs of everyone don't get trampled by those of the first few whose only accomplishment was getting there first. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we will have implemented a just society.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. That includes trolls. I'd say that about 10% of all comments are worthy due to insight or interest. And 10% of all trolls are masterfully crafted. The rest fall into the bin of amateurish repostings of goatse.cx and the like.
I hope that helps. I described a lot more behavior than just the behavior of trolls, but it's a place to start.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Guess this says something about the long-term value of "first mover advantage;" Even though you're first into a market, it doesn't guarantee that you'll stay there.
I'd like to see Shirky address the cost of information and its effect upon "star" power. People can only invest so much time in determining what's important, relevant or interesting. A shortcut to determining what's important, relevant or interesting is to follow the crowd. This is true even though it frequently yields imperfect results. Suppose you wanted to choose 10 interesting weblogs to read each day out of a total of 10,000. One way of choosing those 10 would be to randomly select a weblog, read it, and then judge for yourself if it's worthy. But a better way to find 10 interesting blogs is to start with the most trafficked blog and work your way down... Popularity may not be conclusive, but it does convey information.
It may be true that direct, participatory democracy does not scale, but that observation alone doesn't tell us what system is better.
:-)
Direct democracy doesn't work because people don't have the time or desire to decide everything. For the unimportant matters, we would like to delegate our decision to someone else who thinks like us.
The problem with most current systems of government is that we end up delegating too many of our choices. Our current system was designed when voting was expensive, so a few important plebiscites and an election every few years was all the participation that was practical.
I think we can do better now and let every citizen decide what level of participation they want, on each issue. Instead of votes, we should have proxies. We could delegate that proxy to a worthy politician for most routine matters. However, when an important issue comes up, we could either vote ourselves, or delegate the proxy for that issue to someone else. With a bit of work, we could even categorize decisions and delegate social decisions to one politician and economic decisions to another, for example. We may not be individually heard, but if we pick our proxies well, they can express our opinion for us, kind of like Clay could for you
We could certainly do better than our current system, even if pure direct participation is not possible.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
...but desirable.
/. reader could post front-page stories? And everyone could edit them? What if everyone had editorial mod powers?
Imagine and world where all are equal, in the same way that A = A. I don't want to live there, not even in cyberspace, do you?
But you don't even have to take equality to an absolute to see what a terrible idea it is. What if every
The argument for inequality need not be made from the traditional elitist/aristocratic/etc position. Inequality is simply part of human nature, and one should endeavor to understand it before decrying it as "unfair".