Power laws
Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void recently Tweeted the link to a Clay Shirky article about power laws. The article about power laws when applied to blog rankings was published in 2003 and contains an interesting snapshot of the top blogs at that point in time.
Figure 1 in Shirky’s article has a graph of blog rankings with the names of a number of blogs, although I can’t tell if they are the top 19 blogs in the listing or if they are a continuum from highest to lowest ranking. The curve on the graph illustrates how rankings work according to power laws:
- the second ranked item in a list normally gets 1/2 of the traffic/ranking/sales/etc. of the first item
- the third ranked item gets 1/3
- the tenth ranked item gets 1/10
- the hundredth item gets 1/100
and so on. This power law applies to many, many things around the world, according to various kinds of research.
Back to Figure 1: I had heard of Instapundit.com but I had not heard of any of the other blogs. The chart is from 2003, so I guess six years is like a century on the Web.
Shirky’s article is pretty interesting stuff and worth a read. It also made me think about Technorati.com itself, the once famous blog ranking website. I hadn’t logged into that site for a long time. At a quick glance, the top 100 ranking doesn’t seem to exactly follow the power law distribution that one would expect and obviously there are a lot of blogs there which didn’t exist in 2003.
Just wondering: do you find this kind of stuff interesting? Do you pay attention to Technorati?
Aaron Uhrmacher:
I don't pay much attention to ranking on my blog, although I have submitted it to most of the blog ranking and search engines. All of these systems have different algorithms and methodologies. It seems like a waste of time to focus on climbing the ranks instead of creating interesting content.
Great article. Amazing how it's even more relevant after so many years.
13 August 2009, 8:21 amMark Dykeman:
Hi Aaron. Certainly, each index has its own method of ranking websites and I think you can waste time in pursuing a high ranking. If nothing else, though, it is a listing of blogs that are probably worth checking out at least once.
13 August 2009, 10:25 amIan Rountree:
The first week I started my “pro” blog, I spent a lot of time focusing on stats and ranking and trying to convince all of my friends to join Technorati and claim their blogs and link to mine, so I'd get some authority…
16 August 2009, 10:21 amI found very quickly that the lawe of diminishing returns kicked in. For the first week of effort, I got a pretty fair reward – about 10 on the auth scale, which seemed like a good thing for the limited content I had. But the second week, I spent as much time trying to drum up interest, and added 1 point. Too much work.
I can't help but see a lot of these kinds of services as ancilliary at this point. They're neat, but unless everyone is paying attention,they're a novelty. After all, if none of my market is on Technorati, and all of it can be tracked through GAnalytics and FeedBurner stats, why should I care about Technorati?
Mark Dykeman:
“If a tree falls in the forest…”
17 August 2009, 11:38 am