Power laws or, why I've never gotten my weblog off the ground
Clay Shirky posts a compelling piece,
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.
It makes me wonder about this weblog, which has been in the prototype stage for far longer than I can blame on system management and moving issues. Is it the perfectionist in me rebelling against a system where I'm statistically so likely to end up in the bottom half?
Posted by Wendy at February 08, 2003 02:51 PM
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If your blogging for an audience. Your missing out on half the point. Blog because it's fun, it relaxes you, it proves useful for your own work. People may come, people may not. The measure of success hasn't a thing to do with stats and referes, though those things can be nice but hardly matter.
