Jack William Bell's Journal: Power law distribution in Weblogs

Interesting, the 'Power Law Distribution' theory (aka the 80/20 rule) applies not only to wealth, word distribution, relative programming difficulty and protosteller fragmentation producing binary stars. Apparently it also applies to weblogs. Perhaps this isn't so much interesting as, rather, yet another indication that the 80/20 rule may be one of the emergent behaviors of any system that includes free choice (or randomness if you prefer) in some form.

In the case of weblogs you can claim that 'quality matters' and therefore links and pageviews go to the better weblogs, but that clearly isn't the only answer. There are plenty of weblogs of great quality and low readership. In fact Power Law applies in much the same way to all social systems where people can express preferences in some way. The end result is a star system and, likely, some abuses as people try to cash in on success. Although the cashing in part might be a little harder than for, say, a sports star pushing Nikes: "I only blog with my Compaq! It gets my vacuous rants right."

The linked article points out that, since everyone can't be a star, most of us will gravitate towards something that is more like a conversation between friends -- using LiveJournal as an example. Of course some people can manage a happy medium between 'serious' and 'conversational' blogging. My wife, for example, who has enough readership and linkage to put her at the bottom end of the top 20%. But she avoids political stuff like the plague, and her entries tend to be about things the warbloggers might consider trivial. So perhaps the real trick is to be entertaining.

But what about me? As someone who is blogging 'serious stuff' in the lower end of the scale (as opposed to stories about how I spent my Saturday night) perhaps I should be envious of the big stars, but I ain't. Not even a little. I am not certain how many people are actually reading these words, but the truth is I have only one audience I really care about; and that is you and I. Don't you feel special now? Make sure to tell your friends. Hell, make sure to link!

Via mega-blog-star Instapundit, of course...