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?
