February 14, 2003
Power Laws
Sifry's Alerts: Breaking the (power) law - More on the argument over the assertion that freedom of choice necessarily leads to undeserved inequality.I really like what this guy is doing to challenge that "reality". What he does is turn the metrics for blog popularity upside down, by refusing to award already popular blogs for becoming more popular. This way he measures "fresh" blogs.
However it's not complete because it still doesn't work unless a deserving blogger has already figured out how to reach a large (for them) number of people and make them notice.
I think the remaining part to address is how do we help the person that writes something amazing but with very low likelihood of it being noticed? Think political dissent, or the occasional diamond entry in the rough of a bad blog. I've had some ideas for a couple of services that I'd like to see exist. Say I'm an unconnected guy that writes a new entry and thinks it is deserving of attention. I want a shot. Where do I get my shot? It's not as if I have a lot of people reading it and then deciding they don't like it. I don't even get the readership.
That's the power law to break. How do we give those folks a shot?
Posted by Curt at February 14, 2003 08:26 PM
OK, I'm interested - how do you crack that nut?
Dave
Posted by: David Sifry at February 15, 2003 08:54 PMI'm thinking something like kuro5hin, but somewhat decentralized.
Anyone can take a blog entry and submit it to a queue. The queue can be read and rated by anyone. Then people can create rss feeds from the queue using their own standards of category and vote ratios. The system itself could create generic rss feeds from the results.
Curt