Laurabelle’s Blog

This time the blogging world (or at least the part of it that I read) is afire about an article that Clay Shirky wrote on the subject of power distributions between weblogs. Basically the idea is that in the same way as 20% of the population holds 80% of the wealth, a small percentage of bloggers (the A-list) command most of the traffic. He also divides the blogging world into three tiers: the high-readership mass-media blogs, the low-readership conversation-among-friends blogs, and the in-between blogs.

Lots of people disagree with this, for various reasons. Burningbird argues that the data is flawed and that therefore the conclusions drawn from it are also flawed. Jonathon Delacour thinks that Shirky fails to recognize the importance of the in-between rank of blogs as the place where innovations in blogging will happen. Phil Ringnalda thinks Shirky underestimates the stickiness of links, and Alexander Halavais points out that all links are not created equal. Mark Pilgrim agrees that people are more likely to link to and read blogs that other people have already linked to but cares more about the friends he's made through blogging than the number of hits he gets.

To some extent I agree with all of these people, but mostly, like Stavros, I'm muddling around and trying to figure out exactly what I think about all of this. I think it's undeniable that there are some blogs that get read more than others, but I think that drawing huge conclusions from that would be a mistake. Specifically, I don't think that those with a larger readership have more power than others, or at least not the kind of power that the unequal distribution of money gives. They have more influence, perhaps, but they don't have any control over whether anyone reads or not.

Personally, I'm down towards the conversational end of the blogging spectrum; my first bloggish foray was a periodically-updated story of my experiences abroad in Germany, for the purpose of not having to write things out fifteen times in letters to various people. When I returned home, I kept writing, because friends and family told me they liked reading. Only recently, since I got Movable Type in fact, have I started participated in this kind of discussion, although I've tried to write about interesting things other than my daily life since Maggie complained at me for not having enough intelligent thoughts. Participating in inter-blog discussions is to some extent also a tactic to increase readership since this is a relatively new blog with a small readership. I hope that some of the people who come here through following TrackBack pings will decide to come back occasionally. :-)

But as much as I envy those people whom people read all the time because they always have something interesting to say, I think I would hate having a really high-traffic blog. I would ideally like to find a happy medium, with a record of being interesting and intelligent enough to merit a place on a few blogrolls. That's where I want to be, and I dislike the implication that the lack of links to my blog means that it is unequal to higher-profile blogs.

Shirky does have a point in that bloggers who start out as nobodies will have trouble gaining readership because to start out, there are few links to follow. However, I think TrackBack is going a long way towards changing that, since I can get a link from another blog merely by commenting on it and sending a ping. Okay, now everybody's going to think I'm posting this and pinging people just to get hits, but that's really not it. (Not all of it, anyway. Of course I want people to read my blog, or else I wouldn't write it.) It's like making friends by sticking my head into an ongoing public discussion. Nobody invited me, but nobody said I couldn't join in, and who knows, I could make some friends.

In the end (to tie this in with the title of the post), I think that blogging is basically an egalitarian society. Some bloggers become leaders on the basis of merit and respect, but any blogger is free to vote with hir feet (or links) if s/he doesn't like the way things are going.