Wall Street Journal finds social bookmarking sites follow a power law curve · 129 words posted 02/14/2007 05:04 PM
The Wall Street Journal reports on the Wizards of buzz behind social sites like Digg and Reddit and finds that a few influential users generate a hugely disproportionate share of the content (via).
Although the words power law distribution don’t appear in the article, that’s precisely what the WSJ has uncovered: a small number of highly linked tastemakers are the hubs at the center of a scale-free network. Blogs are a classic example of the power law distribution at work: for every Gruber and kottke there’s hundreds of, uh, me.
See:
- Shirky on Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
- kottke on Weblogs and power laws
- Million Dollar Murray, Malcom Gladwell’s report on how a few homeless people in Reno consume a large share of resources; and
- Linked, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
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