A-List Blogs?

Question. Does the traffic on a-list blogs still follow a power law (years after Shirky repurposed Jakob's power law observation)? I'm not sure it does, particularly if you include sub-communities of 14 year old girls like LiveJournal. I think the tail is so fat right now, and that tail represents so much of the total traffic, that A-list is a useless term. This new medium is continuing the trend towards total disintegration we are seeing in TV-land (first cable and then v-logs) and radio (podcasts). The spew rules.

Comments

[Ben Hyde]

I don't doubt that their are fascinating shifts in attention economy. Certainly one of those is a shift toward more of into the sphere of electronic communications. More and more of the long tail of activities that capture peoples attention are coming onto the radar of telecom and internet platform owners. So sure the long tail is becoming a larger share of the total space of things that might be made to cough up some exchange value.

That said I have seen no data to suggest that the power-law distribution across attention sinks has is being eroded. The name we give such sinks changes from time to time. A hell of lot of attention is going down the throat of some of some of the new hubs.

It's libertarian romantic projection to attempt to wish into existence the end of the power-law distribution. I'd argue that it's the other way around; huge swaths of attention are being condensed into new hubs and if anything the distribution is becoming more severe.

[John Robb]

Ben, the erroneous assumption may be that all blogs are in the same group. Power laws may continue to exist but within hudreds, perhaps thousands, of subgroups. The power law that would result is a decline in the size of the subgroups and not an absolute measure.

For example. I know what the traffic is for many of the top 100 blogs. It is VERY, VERY small relative to the number of blogs in the total universe of blogdom. But within their communities, this traffic is relatively large and probably fits a power law.

Not trying to be utopian. Rather, this is a reflection of what I think is going on.

[a z]

Without a shred of anything but personal, subjective experience I have to agree with Mr. Robb.

There are still A-List bloggers that dominate groups. What has happened is that the early adopters, mainly tech proponents/users, are now a subgroup of the blogging community. Politically focused sites and other interests have fragmented what used to be a homogeneous A-List of early adopters into multiple groups of A-List sites/bloggers.

Note I have no objective data to prove this assertion.

[phil jones]

There was always some question about the power-law thing.

(Follow the Ross Mayfield links from here :
http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?RossMayfieldsThreeScalesOfNetwork )

What I suspect is also happening now is that a lot of people are now looking at memeorandum etc. for some kinds of news. And presumably sites like this exacerbate positive feedback effects.

[John Robb]

Or Digg.

[Ben Hyde]

John - I'm confused.

Are you saying:
a) the tail is getting longer and accounting for more of the total volume.
b) the slope of the curve is becoming less severe.
c) The total volume is increasing.

Or something else entirely?

I vote for a&c. I suspect that b is absolutely false; that it's getting more severe.

Yes there are numerous subsets of the total network of blogs but that's nothing new; there were niche magazines in the 18 hundreds and mail based letter writing rings in the 17th.

The reason such subgroups are interesting is because they make the graph less susceptible to rapid collapse and a yet more severe power-law. So it's certainly an argument that b might be true that there is a rich soup of subgroups; but it's not new and so I'm doubtful that if it is tempering the severity of the slope rather than is just business as usual.

I'll note since the dynamics of the arrival of a large new chunk of the long tail on the world stage is a key part of what's unfolding in your GG framework this is actually a pretty key debate.

[John Robb]

Ben, the total volume under the head is getting increasingly small even as the traffic on those sites increases quickly.

[John Robb]

Ben:

//I'll note since the dynamics of the arrival of a large new chunk of the long tail on the world stage is a key part of what's unfolding in your GG framework this is actually a pretty key debate.//

Of course, in the GG case, the tail can assault the sites of the hubs to shut them down.