Power law and the long tail™

Here are links for the two articles I mentioned today in class:

Link 1: http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Link 2: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

The first link is to a post by Clay Shirky from about seven years ago. In the post, Shirky discusses some of what we've been talking about recently. In particular, he offers an explanation of why a relatively few websites, blogs, discussion groups, etc. capture the greatest number of visits, inbound links, responses, etc.

Shirky also notes that power law distributions have been found in everything from wealth distributions to frequency of word usage. (As an aside, healthcare costs also conform to a power law distribution, and some of you may remember from Principles of PR that we sometimes use the term the 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle when referring to a power law distribution.)

One interesting quote in Shirky's post is, "Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality."

Shirky states that this is a somewhat counter-intuitive finding, and I agree. We've been so conditioned to think about the normal distribution, that it can be easy to assume that this is the only important distribution. Thus, to the casual observer, more diversity of options would likely be expected to create a more equal distribution. Instead, we see the power law distribution manifested frequently in social networks.

The second link is to the article in Wired written by Chris Anderson. As I noted in class, this article was lengthened into a best-selling book by the same name.

Since we covered the main points in Anderson's article, I won't discuss them again here. There is one statistic that I referenced vaguely, though, that I want to clarify--Amazon.com captures more than half of its revenue from books outside its top 130,000 titles. This is, in short, the power of the long tail.

Anyway,  I encourage you to read the articles if you find the topic interesting. One or both articles can provide grist for your blog posts.

P.S. The ™ is ironic.