Blogosphere—Hierarchies and the Long Tail

I am new to the blogosphere and soon after my first few postings I was noticing the hierarchy among the blogs based on their popularity as measured by number of links, traffic, etc. I thought for a bunch of people dedicated to expressing our thoughts and opinions independently, we bloggers seem strangely attracted to hierarchies. We want to know who links to whom? We have services that count links, rank blogs according to whatever is considered the current best measure of importance of a blog. Shouldn’t we be just happy to have a medium where we can put down our thoughts and other (maybe just a few) like-minded souls can drop by accidentally or purposefully and read what we wrote? That ought to be good enough, but somehow of our obsession with pinging all the aggregators the moment we put down a few new words belies that.

I knew I was not onto anything new and a quick search proved that. I found Clay Sharky's February 8, 2003 post on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality where he uses the power law distribution to explain that the affinity for developing a hierarchy is perfectly normal behavior for the blogosphere. There is, of course, no enforced hierarchy in blogosphere, but one emerges nonetheless. The nice part is that although the hierarchical structure is there, who occupies what position is shifting constantly, so you have as good a chance as anyone else to get to the top! Besides, if you can't make it to the top few, there's always The Long Tail :-)

Note: To read more about the "long tail" (the term refers to the tail of the power law distribution), see Chris Anderson's The Long Tail blog.

Tags: blog weblog conversation writing blogger writer hierarchy power law long tail longtail powerlaw blogosphere

Comments

[Joe Wikert]

Naba, I'm "guilty as charged!". You're absolutely right about the fascination with who links in, etc. I find myself looking at the (limited) inbound linkage information for my own blog. On a positive note, I'm often looking at the google redirects to see what people were searching for. One of the most common search strings which seems to be leading people to my blog: "average author advance", or something similar. The good part about this is that it helps me zero in on what people are looking for -- I use it as a way to drum up ideas for new posts. What it *doesn't* tell me is "what are people looking for that I'm not covering, and therefore they're going elsewhere". Got any ideas on how to figure that one out? I thought about adding a "Submit a question" box to the blog, but I assume if anyone wants to ask me something, they can just click on my e-mail link and go that route. In fact, a few people already have. I just wonder what other items I should add to encourage this sort of thing.

[vikk]

To the extent that I write to communicate and be read, I suppose I'm guilty as charged. I am curious as to who those souls are that spend those precious seconds and minutes reading my blog, and I enjoy visiting their sites to see what they are up to.

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