I'm interested in how power laws apply to the web, so I found this discussion interesting. Warning math jaron ahead.
Isenberg takes up Power Laws. David Isenberg says: Yahoo and Google are permanently popular; they have low Zipf volatility. But my hypothesis is that there's a middle tier of blogs with high Zipf volatility, where a well expressed idea or a funny story or a new factoid can rapidly catapult a blog from #100,000 to #1000, or in rare cases even to #10, in a matter of hours.
I am not sure how you'd test this idea experimentally (comments appreciated), and I am afraid that if you take 100 blogs, say between #100 and #200, and look at their delta-rank over a one week period, they might not look any different than the blogs between #20,000 and #20,100. Despite this caution, I strongly suspect that blog rank (and web site rank, to a lesser extent) has a burstiness that is not characteristic of other media, that permits new ideas (and new sites and blogs) to bubble up and subside, to move more readily than other media along the x-axis of Zipf's Law.
His intuition is right, but it doesn't just apply to blogs. Consider other power-law distributed things, such as music and movies - their rankings suffer sudden volatility too.
In one sense, the argument is obviously true - with a true power law distribution, once you get down to the smaller numbers there are many with the same value, so a change of one in your value can move you a long way up (or down) the rankings.
However, the underlying catastrophe theory that predicts power laws also predicts cascades of arbritrary size too, so Isenberg's theory is likely to be right. [Epeus' epigone]
Uber-nerd (in the best possible way) Andy Baio has a launched a new site called Upcoming.org, a collaborative event calendar. Metafilter creator (and social software hater) Matt Haughey has the scoop:
Upcoming ties together a few of the strings that the past couple years of software tinkering has made for us. It's got parts of Craigslist, MetaFilter, Friendster, and weblogs rolled into it. You create an account and post events you're going to, and friends and others in your metro area can find out about them via the site or RSS. Every event is like a blog post that allows comments from others.
I've had stock options three times in my life so far. None have paid off. At all. Not a dollar. [snip] ... Will I get rich at Microsoft? No. I only have a little more than a thousand options. Certainly not in the range of some of our execs who have hundreds of thousands to millions. ... [snip] I don't really care. Why? My main motivation is doing something that 1) Matters and 2) Is fun. [emphesis added] Microsoft matters and it's fun working here. If someone offers me a job that's more fun, or matters more, I'd consider it. If they only offered me a chance to get rich, I'd turn it down.
I agree with Scoble. I haven't been in the industry as long, but I already have option from a previous startup whose only remaining value is lining my bird cage. At the moment I'm an interface designer at eBay. These are post bubble days and I don't expect to be buying a luxury liner with my measly options any time soon, but you know what? It doesn't matter. My work makes makes life a little bit easier for 70 million people every day and that's pretty dam cool.
