Several of our recent readings have discussed the rich-get-richer phenomenon, and applied the concept to blogs. Shirky writes about the resulting inequality in the blogging world, where a few A-list blogs receive the vast majority of the traffic. If you try to graph the top sites by the number of in bound links pointing to them, the result is a power law distribution with a long tail, or a logarithmic curve. While this data isn't mind boggling, I have my own small blog about the outdoors, so it was interesting to me.
In class we talked about long tail graphs are how they are more a line of best fit, with the data at both extremes containing many outliers. This got me wondering if the middle of the graph is also misrepresented, because of The Dip, a concept coined by Seth Godin. For example, let's say you start a blog, and start gaining traction. Then your blog's views start skyrocketing and you think you're going to make it big, but suddenly, you plateau--no more new readers. In fact, your readership declines slightly. That's the Dip, and many bloggers will quit at that point, because they don't realize that on the other side is lasting success. This idea doesn't apply just to blogs, but many other things as well.
For me, this was another reminder that networks are more complex than the graphs used to represent them, and the road to success, especially if measured by in bound links, is not always an increasing logarithmic line.
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