Blogger effect.
Like Dave, I wish Clay Shirky would start a blog too. I know it's not Clay's style, just like it's not, say, Jerry Michalski's (although Jerry has a blog and Clay doesn't). Some things are best learned by doing, and it strikes me that in the absence of doing Clay hasn't learned how poorly the power story applies in the blogosphere.
In Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, Clay runs blogging through the power law mill, and the result is akin to running a cat through a Cuisinart: you get easily measured stuff that bears no resemblence to the subject of the study.
One of his points:
Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair.
The inequality Clay talks about — the fact that some of us are graced with more links and readers than others — is of a purely numerical sort. It says nothing about why people write blogs, and why readers read blogs.
To illustrate my own point here, go sort your email by name. Is there a power curve there? If there is, does it matter?
For many of us (me included), blogs serve a kind of public email function. Since a bunch of correspondents wrote to me asking for my opinion about Clay's essay, I'm writing back to the bunch of them, plus everybody else who cares (a sum which, as a percentage of the true everybody, verges on zero).
.......
Launching good new blogs is no less easy than it ever was, and good new blogs grow no slower than they ever did. Blogging tools like Trackback and Technorati don't signal the drift of blogging toward some kind of portalesque middle-distance, but rather a constant increase in the number and variety of tools available to the practice — plus the constant change those tools bring to the practice itself. Blogging is radically different than it was six months ago. Technorati alone has changed my blogging life, largely by acquainting me with all the worthy blogs with which I had previously been unfamiliar.
The whole blogosphere is characterized by a high exponent of the experimenter effect. To borrow from Forrest Gump, blogging is as blogging does, and that changes every time somebody blogs something interesting that somebody else blogs about. It's wild.
