This excellent article on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality has been making the rounds over the last couple of days, and for good reason:
This excellent article on Power Laws,
Weblogs, and Inequality has been making the rounds over the last
couple of days, and for good reason: it makes an elegant, rigorous case
for a power-law (think “80/20 rule”) explanation for why it seems like
just a few weblogs are actually read (and the vast majority
are just out there, insignificant, like this one here).
Though there are more new bloggers and more new readers every day, most of the
new readers are adding to the traffic of the top few blogs, while most new
blogs are getting below average traffic, a gap that will grow as the weblog
world does. It’s not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely
read, but it’s harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next
year.[…]
Meanwhile, the long tail of weblogs with few readers will become
conversational. In a world where most bloggers get below average traffic,
audience size can’t be the only metric for success. LiveJournal had this
figured out years ago, by assuming that people would be writing for their
friends, rather than some impersonal audience. Publishing an essay and having
3 random people read it is a recipe for disappointment, but publishing an
account of your Saturday night and having your 3 closest friends read it feels
like a conversation, especially if they follow up with their own accounts.