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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."
Combining Old Kike & CLITs since 1991.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
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prick
forgot the post anonymously box, didja? Good, cause I hate you anyways you socialist liberal fool!
Just like Slashdot and Kuro5hin, you need to rate people based on the typical quality of contributions that they make, whether via story submissions, comments, or diary/journal entries.
I mean, can you imagine a thousand CLIT posts (like that last story had) filling up every weblog from 1.1.1.1 to 255.255.255.255?
Seriously, even if just a few people feel like they "don't belong", it's to the benefit of the community as a whole to give a relative rating to all content that's posted on a site. Friend/foe systems, such as the one here at Slashdot, tend to actually make community better rather than worse.
I love Web communities (just look at how much time I was on them
Anyone who feels left out on the Web, a place where anyone can post nearly anything at any time on any server, should really consult a psychologist or something.
[End rant]
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Sorry, this is different from high school cliques... how?
Amazing what makes news. Sociology 101.
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
Wow. I am not normally one to be a grammar-Nazi however you really need to use the preview button before you post. I have read more legible h4x0r 5p33k!
But then again, perhaps you did not take typing in high skewl.