Who's Counting: New Blogs, New Songs and News Stories

March 5, 2006 -- -- Whether about blogs, songs or news stories, when people must make decisions among many different alternatives, those making them later are often greatly influenced by those making them earlier.

That creates a cascading effect that results in a "popular-get-more-popular" sort of phenomenon along many different dimensions.

This is one reason so-called power law distributions are so common in social situations.

In particular, such power law dynamics partially explain the fact that a few blogs are visited by millions, while the vast majority are lucky if they attract the bloggers' close friends and relatives.

An informal explanation involves the huge and rapidly increasing number of blogs.

Given all these choices, a surfer will be more likely to visit sites that are already popular just as a diner walking in an area with many restaurants will be more likely to choose one that has already attracted other diners than one that is empty.

The blogs that attract the first visitors and links are marginally and then overwhelmingly more likely to attract later ones and hence ultimately more likely to become one of the few must-visit sites.

Being a pioneer helps in the blogosphere as elsewhere.

As Clive Thompson observed in a recent issue of New York magazine, most of the critical nodes in the blogosphere have been around for ages in Internet time.

Boing Boing, a tech blog online for five years, is the most-popular site according to Technorati, which ranks and catalogs sites.

Among gossip sites, Gawker is the leader, while Daily Kos and Instapundit are the most-popular liberal and conservative political sites, respectively. By contrast the vast majority of tech, gossip, political and other blogs are empty restaurants.

The same sort of disproportion of popularity characterizes Web sites generally as well as many other disparate phenomena. (For a slightly more mathematical exposition of power laws, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/lastword/story/0,,1265949,00.html.)