http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/06/power-laws-internet-john-naughton
Pareto's Principle is a special example: a small number of people/sites/words/etc account for most of the action, with a "long tail" getting very little of it.
Thus, instead of most websites having an "average" number of inbound links, a very small number of sites (the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons of this world) have colossal numbers of links, while millions of sites have to make do with only a few.
Everywhere you look on the internet you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian's online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper's monthly online audience
There are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership...................Various explanations have been said for this, but really it's just an illustration of the power of power law distributions
Clay Shirky once put it:
"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".
When blogging went mainstream in the 90s, many people speculated that the net would expand what Jürgen Habermas called the
"public sphere", ie "an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action".
With the relentless consolidation of mass-media ownership in the hands of giant conglomerates, that public sphere had been steadily shrinking in the postwar era, with worrying implications for liberal democracy.
It seemed a racing certainty that a technology that enabled anyone to become a global publisher without having to kow-tow to editorial "gatekeepers" would change things for the better.
Fifteen years on, there are still grounds for optimism, but only if we can find a way of overcoming the tyranny of power laws.
Pareto's Principle is a special example: a small number of people/sites/words/etc account for most of the action, with a "long tail" getting very little of it.
Thus, instead of most websites having an "average" number of inbound links, a very small number of sites (the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons of this world) have colossal numbers of links, while millions of sites have to make do with only a few.
Everywhere you look on the internet you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian's online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper's monthly online audience
There are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership...................Various explanations have been said for this, but really it's just an illustration of the power of power law distributions
Clay Shirky once put it:
"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".
When blogging went mainstream in the 90s, many people speculated that the net would expand what Jürgen Habermas called the
"public sphere", ie "an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action".
With the relentless consolidation of mass-media ownership in the hands of giant conglomerates, that public sphere had been steadily shrinking in the postwar era, with worrying implications for liberal democracy.
It seemed a racing certainty that a technology that enabled anyone to become a global publisher without having to kow-tow to editorial "gatekeepers" would change things for the better.
Fifteen years on, there are still grounds for optimism, but only if we can find a way of overcoming the tyranny of power laws.
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