phil ringnalda

Clay Shirky’s essay on power law distributions and blogs is mostly dead-on, saying that the mythical “A-list” of overly-linked blogs doesn’t exist outside the natural result of people making choices that are affected by other people’s choices, but I think that his belief that it’s a fair system, where anyone can rise to the top (even though they probably won’t), fails to consider the stickiness of links. He says that

The second [reason the inequality of links is fair] is that blogging is a daily activity. As beloved as Josh Marshall (TalkingPointsMemo.com) or Mark Pilgrim (DiveIntoMark.org) are, they would disappear if they stopped writing, or even cut back significantly.

While there may be aspects of blogging, like “a link and a snark about daily news,” where that’s true, it certainly isn’t true of all sorts of blogging, as a look at Mark’s November 2002 shows. He took off from the 1st to the 19th, but I haven’t noticed him running short of hits since. Partly it depends on what sort of links you are talking about: if you mean “what percentage of the newly published post-to-post links today pointed to me?” then you won’t get very many if you don’t post. On the other hand, if you are talking about things like “how many post-to-post links point to me, total?,” or “how many people have me on their blogroll?,” or “how will the number of post-to-post links to my next post compare to my last post?,” or even “how will the number of links to my post on foo compare to the number to Bob’s post on foo?,” then having been around for a while and posted some interesting things counts for more than just pounding away at it every single day. Most people won’t unsubscribe from your RSS feed or rip you out of their blogroll if you take some time off, and I suspect that I’m not the only one who would just as soon have you wait until you’ve got something to say before you post.

After all, if you had to post every day (or even week) to get read, then you wouldn’t be reading this now.