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Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Posted 09/02/2003 under research •

Clay Shirky has written an essay keeping in mind the inevitability of power laws that develop within social systems. According to Barabasi, all Webpages follow a precise mathematical expression which has been called a ‘power law’. In the normal course of events, natural occurrences follow a bell curve distribution but occasionally, nature produces quantities that follow a power law distribution instead. Every power law has a unique exponent and this exponent can tell us, for example, how many popular Web pages exist out there relative to the less popular ones.

Shirky investigates what he terms ?A Predictable Imbalance? amongst weblogging sites?..

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. 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.

go to essay here

Reference - Barabasi, A. 2002, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge. back

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Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality