Due to the unavailability of a more qualified/desirable moderator I have been drafted to lead a session at Saturday’s BloggerCon. Supposedly there will be nearly 100 people in a single room at Harvard Law School from 1:30-2:45 pm and we’re supposed to talk about the concentration of readership among a tiny handful of blogs.
An article by Clay Shirky is the original source for the session.
This assignment frightens me for a number of reasons. First the original proposition does not seem sufficiently surprising. We are all familiar with the fact that NBC has more viewers than the local public access channel. Second I’m not sure what issue is amenable to a free-form unanchored discussion among 100 people but this one doesn’t seem like it. That’s one of my stock refrains in the online community world, actually, is that the publisher needs to frame the discussion with articles or the whole site loses focus because nobody can figure out what the purpose is.
Anyone have an idea for breaking the participants up into groups of 10, having them do something for 10 minutes, and then report the results to the whole crowd? I think many people there will have laptops and Harvard Law School has wireless access (MIT does too but visitors have to donate a kidney to the I/S department before they are authorized to use it).
Yawn. Why not have a conference about trolling Slashdot.
Talk about your own experience, and of course your own blog, i.e., at what point do you sit on this curve – and what does that mean for you personnally (i.e., you couldn’t give a monkeys, or you are lying awake at night worrying about it, or you are jelous of all those other ‘stars’ with their popular blogs – which must mean they are getting more love than you). After that – talk about something else.
Good luck.
Sorry I misspelled jealous – oops.
Jim: This is a discussion, not a talk. So even if I had something interesting to say about having the world’s 9323rd most popular blog it wouldn’t fit the format. Personally I find it most gratifying when a reader searches for the answer to a question in Google and finds something that I’ve written to be helpful.
Google is an interesting aspect, perhaps the blog playing field can be leveled through the application of search engines.
I believe the the mass of people concentrate on a few blogs because they are drawn to a crowd, ie: if something cool is happening, it must be popular, so I must hang out at a popular blog to see what everybody thinks is cool.
Weak reasoning, but pretty common. Anyhow, having searchable blogs would allow ranking of ‘cool things’ with no relation to the popularity of the blog that the discussion is playing out on.
This would, at the very least, expose some unique ideas about thte current ‘cool topic’ that might not get any play otherwise.
On the other hand, I used to post to alt.chrome.the.moon, so you can take it for what it is worth.
Noticed this and it looks relevant and interesting to me, though the scope is larger than just blogs. I agree with you, however: the fact that more people read your blog than mine is sort of an obvious, so-what kind of fact.
Interestingly, TV audience distributions, as with your NBC example, aren’t powerlaw distributions, as the artificial scarcity of broadcast spectrum, and its hangover effect even when cable has become the normal mode of distribution, significantly flattens the head of the curve, relative to what we would expect a pure powerlaw to look like.
Social networking sites have the same characteristic, where the upper limit on human contact flattens the number of links enjoyed by the most connected nodes.
Like you, I thought by writing this I was filling in a little blank — after all, Jakob Nielsen had published his study of powerlaw ranking of web page traffic years before. However, the piece clearly was surprising, given the attention it got.
Some of that can be explained by the gap between technical and general understanding of network dynamics. People with reams of double-log graph paper in their offices look at the original Blogosphere Ecosystem numbers and say “Well sure,” but for the general public, even the general blogging public, the distribution is surprising in part because it is so unfamiliar.
A second, and perhaps more important point, though, is that many people, especially the loyal band of media critics, have been claiming that the inequality between NBC and the local cable access channel is because of some nefarious control by The Man. Evidence that in a relatively unconstrained system, there is _greater_ inequality between the #1 and #N positions discomfits those that want freedom to lead to more equality of outcome.
I had feared the discussion was going to be all about how the power-law was wrong, everyone should be a Happy Blogging Bear, we’re going to router around BigMedia in The New Era and eeryone just Doesn’t Get It, and anyway it’s right because it is the outcome of the free market :-).
As I quipped, a discussion on wealth and inequality run by Martha Stewart.
I’m glad to hear that won’t be the case 🙂
My interest is to figure out exactly where the blog bubble-blowing goes wrong, and if I can raise my position in the ranks at all (probably not possible, but I do dream).
And no, it’s not obvious at all, based on all the very cruel let-them-eat-cake thinking in the blog A-list.
If people stop telling me I can fight Slashdot with a personal blog, then you can say it’s obvious.
Just be be kinda old fashioned, why don’t you give your ‘groups of ten’ a pile of index cards?
Let then work up their ideas and then present them at a central terminal, kinda like organizing you thoughts before grabbing the open mike at a presentation.
Why not talk about the antidote: small world networks?
I think you should break down into one group of 2, one group of 4, one of 8, one of 16…
Since you’re forced into the Town Meeting format, it seems like you should try to have a debate, or a series of small debates.
It’s true that a 100-person chat is unwieldy… but “dividing into small groups and having them report back” is exactly the sort of format I used to dread back in high school. Your group meets. The group has no leader at first, so it takes 10 minutes of Shrugging Out Loud (“Gosh, I have no ideas. Do YOU have any ideas?”) before everyone figures out who the leader is. Then you have an abbreviated discussion, which gets about halfway to its natural conclusion before time runs out. Finally, you have the presentations, when you get to hear one person from each group present the results. This is always boring, because (a) listening to the Powerpoint summary of a conversation is a lot less interesting than the actual conversation itself; (b) the groups are independent, so they don’t address each others’ points – the presentation is not a conversation; and (c) you’re so busy worrying about how embarrassing your own group’s presentation will be — and, if you’re a presenter, your short-term memory is so preoccupied with formulating your little speech — that you don’t even listen to the other groups very carefully.
Hm. The good news is that I’ve just written a little essay on the topic of why the Blogosphere tends to resemble a few top bloggers discussing amongst themselves, while the rest of us watch from the sidelines. The bad news is that I still haven’t helped come up with a format. I suppose you could spend the session debating what the format of the session ought to be.
Maybe you should have a design meeting. Summarize Shirky’s main points. Talk about the political implications. Then announce that the goal of the session is to redesign the Blogosphere: Pretend you are Dave Winer, or Berners-Lee, or God Almighty. How would you redesign the Web (or network television, if for some unearthly reason you think that’s a better starting point) so that each voice gets its “fair” hearing? Or so that important factual information gets taught to readers while outright lies are deemphasized? Or… whichever other quixotic goal you wish to attain?
Provide an example of a proposal. The degenerate proposal, of course, is to do nothing – because Shirky is wrong, or because the concentration of readership is just fine. But there are other possibilities. (“The problem with weblogs is that nobody reads mine, which is the source of all wisdom. I propose that Microsoft should be forced to provide links, on their homepage, to the most thoughtful blogs.”) Then open the floor and allow people to make proposals. Write the proposals down someplace. Perhaps you should collect a few proposals, vote on the two or three that look most interesting, and have a more in-depth debate about each of those, rather than just entertaining more and more wacky ideas until time runs out. Or maybe wacky ideas will be more fun.
I have no idea if any of this would work, of course. But the good news is that I’ve always found your meetings immensely entertaining, if not always productive. 🙂 Whatever you do, you’ll knock ’em dead.
Thanks, Mike. I’m now convinced that you should be moderating this meeting instead of me! I hope that you’ll be there to keep me from screwing up too badly.
I bet on the lotto so I can be a billionaire. I keep stage makeup in the trunk of my car in case I’m discovered one day. I work two jobs and study at night so I can buy my own airplane, house, Benz, and a swimming pool.
And I blog despite a readership of 6 because if I just stick with it I’ll be an A-list blogger eventually.
Blog Ambition: An American Dream.
i think the sam thing that Microsoft needbe to provide links, on their homepage.
Just wanted to tell you that I thought your session was delightful yesterday. You managed to really evoke the psychological reasons for blogging – especially the fun of it – in a way most of bloggercon did not. And thanks for Travels with Samantha. I started it last night and it promises to be a wonderful read.
i agree