Heh. Familiar? :)
Brian
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: 11 Feb 2003 20:26:01 -0000 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/11/1740233 Posted by: michael, on 2003-02-11 19:20:16 Topic: media, 93 comments
from the network-effects dept. [1]scubacuda writes "[2]Clay Shirky has written an [3]excellent article entitled "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." Simply put, diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality: "A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on." A must read for anyone interested in the statistics, fairness, and power relations of blogging."
Very interesting.
I blogged in my prototype/experimental blogowiki in Spanish a few days ago, about Zipf's law. It is in Spanish, though.
http://memojo.com/Wiki.jsp?page=SantiagoGalaBlog
An interesting quote from a paper on the Law: In spite of carrying substantial grammatical and semantical structure, the natural and artificial languages seem to exhibit still a lot of chaos typical for simple, low-order Markov models. Approximating the linguistic reality by these models and using various techniques of mathematical analysis, one can find some sensible predictions for the parameter dependence.
At the end, the Heart's Queen race is even worse: you need to increase your speed exponentially just to keep pace ;-)
References
1. http://`scubacuda'`at'`iname.com'/ 2. http://www.shirky.com/ 3. http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
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