A Blogger Blogs about a Magazine Article about Blogging!

Oh the self-reflexivity of it all! Oh and by the way: this is my fourth post today! How unusually productive of me. Anyway, the February issue of New York Magazine's got a cool article called Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom, written by Clive Thompson- who runs the excellent science and technology blog collision detection. The article tries to answer the question of why some blogs become really popular and others languish in obscurity, despite the quality of their content.

Well it seems that Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University who specializes in network theory- which the article describes as "a mathematical model of how information travels inside groups of loosely connected people, such as users of the Web"- studied this phenomenon by analysing 433 blogs and found that a very small number of blogs received hundreds of inbound links (links being the equivalent of popularity votes for blogs) whereas the vast majority of the rest barely had any at all. So we have a very small A-list who get loads of links, a slightly larger B-list (less links than the A-list, but still substantial) and a huge C-list (all us folk who hardly get any links at all *sniff sniff*).

OK so I guess this isn't news to a lot of bloggers out there. What is interesting, though, is that the curve that Shirky obtained by sorting the 433 blogs in order of most linked to least is a power-law distribution- a distribution that is common to many social systems. Shirky thinks that this result can be explained by a simple quirk of human nature- that when we try to choose amongst many given choices (in the case of blogs, a dizzying number of choices), we'll gravitate towards the most popular ones. Which, of course, means that popular things just become more and more popular, and vice versa.

That certainly does seem to describe the "blogosphere," at least to an extent. It also explains why small blogs often try to catch the attention of larger A-list blogs to try and get linked on their front page, which guarantees a surge of attention. There's lots more interesting stuff in the article, but I'm going to cut this post short and send a link to BoingBoing. :P

EDIT: Oh yeah, Clay Shirky's got his own website where you can go if you wanna read more about his research into power laws and blogs.