10.31.2011

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality


Clay Shirky’s article “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”, presents an explanation for the inequality in traffic to weblogs: distributions in social systems with freedom of choice and diversity of choices follow a power law function that boils down to 1/N. He develops this explanation by showing graphs of blogs ranked by number of inbound links, yahoo groups ranked by number of subscribers, and LiveJournal users ranked by number of friends. He also makes a deductive argument for this effect through a hypothetical example of a thousand people each picking their 10 favorite blogs, and considering how the outcome would look if there were no shared tastes or recommendations among friends versus how it looks when the choices of the first people surveyed affect choices of subsequent people. His purpose is to show that inequality is a ubiquitous feature of social systems in order to dispel the notion that the inequality is a moral failing of the people participating. He is writing to an audience of people familiar with Internet social media and interested in the social aspects of web blogging.

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