Fight the Power Law
Mary Hodder summarizes and comments on discussion about the effects of rankings on weblogs:
Whenever there is a measurement, a power law develops where those at the top sit and the rest bend their behaviors toward them, trying to attain top status they don’t have. Link counts mean people change their behavior to get more links. It’s not the spammers I fear, but us.
But if we get rid of rankings, and instead see topic based communities with long standing conversation, can we get out of some of that power law dynamic? I’m not sure. Maybe not. Maybe we must simply refuse the metrics all together. I think it’s an open question.
Women are not fairly represented in the most popular weblogs and I note, with shame, that my own blogroll these days is almost exclusively male. When I first started weblogging in January 2001 perhaps a third of my regular reads were from female webloggers. What is now called the blogosphere was pretty evenly mixed.
I took a long break from running a public weblog (switching to a private one to keep track of links that interested me in the way I use del.icio.us now) and when I returned with this present one the medium seemed very male.
I really welcome the attempt she’s championing to move away from a “top lists” approach where new entrants to the scene link to the current favourites in the hope of a link back thereby reinforcing the A list’s dominance. There’s a post-Cluetrain self-congratulatory air among popular bloggers that conveniently ignores the fact that they, like the old media they deride, tend to treat their readers as passive consumers.
Creating tools that flatten the curve and build communities of interest will enrichen everyone intellectually and emotionally (although a few may find their Adsense revenues declining).