Going back and reviewing this piece in more detail subsequently, I find I'm not totally convinced by the way I argued it, even though I still agree with my conclusions. I think fundamentally, the piece of information that I should have included but which I left out, was that this so-called set of 'A-listers' who seem to be so solid and impenetrable a group are clearly not. Else how could the warblogging community thrive so quickly and effectively? And people like diveintomark.org or Aaron Swartz have become well-respected and enthusiastically linked-to representatives of the culture very swiftly as well. There's something weird about this whole thing for me - as if weblogging actually was still thought to be the monoculture that it probably was three years ago when there were only a few dozen people doing it. However much the 'charts' may say otherwise, we're really not in competition with each other for traffic and respect. At worst we're at competition with ourselves to write compelling content that's of value to other people. And that seems ok to me...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at January 31, 2003 7:18 PM

Thanks, Tom. Your point about the flexibility of 'A-listers' as a category, especially the example of warbloggers, gets exactly at one of the points I was trying to make. Namely that there are multiple and flexible routes to success (assuming, for purposes here, that we define success as visibility). And while I think that there are ways in which power and influence online compare to offline--ie, some people have weight to throw around--I don't think it's as simple as 'person X is popular, and they have the power to decide whether person Y succeeds or not'. And, as you say, it's all success in a particular, fairly insular sphere.

I have to admit that I feel a bit guilty about heading 'once more into the breach': I was really thinking in hypotheticals and concepts, but through my own (perhaps poor) choice of examples it's being read as commentary on specific people far more than I meant it.

→ Posted by: steve at January 31, 2003 7:43 PM

Call me blinkered if you like, but I think I'm proud to say that I only ever briefly recognised what constituted an A-list (if indeed, such a thing exists) - and that would be back when I first started blogging and was (briefly) interested in the "blogging community". These days, I wouldn't know what an A-list blog was if the writer came up and repeatedly slapped me round the face while shouting, "I'm A-list! I'm A-list!" And that makes me happy.

Too often, I find that the hugely successful bloggers write to pander to their audience, rather than writing what they want to say. I don't want to read writing that simply exists for the common denominator - we can get that from thousands of other media sources. I read weblogs for the essential individuality of each writer.

Oh, and the line: "individually most webloggers are as nothing to the world at large." I couldn't agree more. To use a somewhat more American phrase, I really think it's time that blogging got over itself already. The navel-gazing is fast turning into sickening narcissism.

→ Posted by: Vaughan at February 1, 2003 12:19 AM

I quite like narcissism! More seriously though, I do think these things are worth debating and I'd almost like the encourage people to think quite carefully about what they're doing when they blog. This is the first technology that's really facilitated many thousands of people to 'broadcast' their opinions into the ether in a semi-permanent fashion and while no individual weblog is particularly important, I do think that these hundreds of thousands of people joining in could be demonstrably significant in changing the way in which mainstream media operates with the general public. But I guess we'll have to wait and see on that one...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 1, 2003 12:47 AM

Jason is right. Diversity + preference = inequality, and the greater the number of people in the system, the greater inequality. That's not sociology, that's math.

The element of time is also vital. The warbloggers appeared in a much sparser ecosystem than the one that exists today, for example, so new entrants becoming part of the 5% of the blogosphere that accounts for 50% of the traffic will have a harder time.

I'd also dispute that "no individual weblog is particularly important." Instapundit, boingBoing and andrewsullivan.com _are_ particularly important. Check your own traffic some time, and you will see that the distribution from other weblogs is _also_ a power law. If what weblogs do -- putting things out there for people to read -- is good, then doing more of that is better, and some sites do more of it, a lot more, and that gap is increasing, not decreasing.

"Mainstream media" is just a synonym for "stuff I'm already used to." As we get used to weblogs, they will become mainstream media too, and will take on the trappings of mainstream media. They will have an above-average effect on traffic, they will not be able to link to everything that comes to their attention, they will have to implement processes to decide what is 'blog-worthy', and when that happens, as a result of their success, the people whose work is deemed non-blog-worthy will start bitching about how they have become like the mainstream media. And they will be right.

Mainstream media is not the way it is because it's run by dolts. Its the way it is because as audiences scale up, center-to-edge connections continue to rise, but edge-to-center and edge-to-edge connections don't (and can't). This is happening, today, to blogs, and 2 years from now, some of the current A list and some new entrants will be full-fledged old-media-like _channels_. Glenn and Andrew are already close to that now.

-clay

→ Posted by: Clay Shirky at February 1, 2003 3:27 AM

You all have some good points, and I agree in general... (sans too much philosophical talk for right now I am insanely tired, and probably would not even know what I am typing in the first place.)... Diversity is what weblogs are all about. Myself, I've been successfully blogging for almost a year now, and I really don't care if I have a thousand people a day reading my blog or whatnot. Blogs are about individuality, creativity, ...a look into the mind and observations of another human being. The exchange of opinions, observations, and the intermingling of individual personalies is what makes this world go round. It's about humanity, and since we're all human (or at least I would hope so...) there is much we can learn from each other, even if it is not earth-shattering. I've become a regular reader hear at plasticbag.org, and I can honestly say this, I am learning much from my readings of this blogging individual. I am amused, intruiged, compelled, and even sometimes in disagreement... but, afterall, in a society of freedoms which we enjoy so, isn't that what blogs promote. .... I'm proud to be a blogging individual, and eager as always to share my insight and personality with those interested in reading. (Ha... ok, who knows how much sense that prolonged comment made. I can be very philosophical, but I guess it's not easy at these levels of fatigue... ok... bed time.)

Regards,
A seriously tired blogging individual,
Actor/ Artist,
-Jon Baas

→ Posted by: Jon Baas at February 1, 2003 7:49 AM

Clay - obviously I bow to your expertise in these matters, but I'm not sure I agree. In my original version of this piece I do have a chunk about the hundred most popular weblogs and how special rules might come into effect at that level, but it seemed half-hearted and clumsy so I left it out.

Here's where I disagree - mainstream versus personal publishing first. They're clumsy terms and I accept that - perhaps I could describe them better as centralised versus distributed publishing. But terminology aside, I think there are a number of qualitative differences between the two, one of which is just obvious - that the weblog of an individual represents that individual and is the work of that individual, rather than the conglomeration of works by a variety of people, rather than a clumping together of sources under a banner of brand. It doesn't sound like much, but it is - people's interests change, their emphasis changes, their relationship to work changes - a weblog can never hope to be as stable and reliable a long-term product as a newspaper or television station. People take holidays. Newspapers don't. A close analogy might be the celebrity-based TV comment show or the newspaper column - but shows come and go, newspaper columnists change perspective. A weblog doesn't match with a channel, it matches one of the things that can be put into a channel. The fact that they're interesting to people might in fact be based on the fact that they're not the same as old established media channels. They might reflect the Tivo / MP3 era of componentised media blocks that people assemble to meet their own needs and values as they want...

Secondly the network that lies behind the individual weblogs remains of crucial importance. The links and commentary and stories that circulate through blogspace have to start somewhere and be picked up by a hell of a lot of other people to manifest strongly enough to jump species and escape from weblog-circles (or to reach the most trafficked sites). We become exposed to the maximum amount of potent memetic material as a direct result of the size of the network that is looking for this material - and even the least read weblogs have a weight there. It is the connections between all individuals individuals that matter here. The size of each individual is important, but it is less important than you'd think.

A couple of examples, which I think also demonstrate some of the differences between the distributed and centralised, personal and mainstream... (i) There's the power of the incoming link - that one might be a low-traffic site that links to a high-traffic site with a pertinent point and the high-traffic site notices the impact in the referral log and chooses to respond in kind with a link and a reference. This is the oldest and most widely established way of distributing memetic material from the smaller to the larger weblogs. It happens everyday and it works. (ii) And while referrer logs depend on the amount of through-put traffic to make an impact, link-tracking functionality and trackback don't - Blogdex, Daypop, Technorati all base themselves around a uniquely democratic and distributed system of establishing the value of a piece of micro-content. Everyone's vote is equally important, equally valuable. And each may contain legitimate commentary. Trackback - for all its flaws - is also a uniquely democratic piece of kit that (once you've got past the legitimately tricky expertise barrier of figuring out how it works) builds two-way links that mean that the most-trafficked still have an honest relationship with the least trafficked.

The whole system has emerged in such a way - and continues to emerge in even more of away - as to assert the individual value and significance of each microcontent 'vote', and not only to assert it but to make it reciprocal - to partially redistribute the traffic. As ever, it seems, the technology tries to make the world as quickly moving, as resistant to entrenched power structures and as close to nodal networks as it can...

Finally, I want to have a few words about the power of aggregation and aggregated content. This seems to me to be fundamental. As far as I can tell the next big shift in weblog-tech is going to be the site that brings the best writing from webloggery to the surface in the most timely and organised fashion possible. It seems to me to be directly related to processes and algorithms like Google's - as seen in action on Google News - which themselves work on the basis of microcontent votes - gestural links and clustering derived from the decisions of hundreds of millions of active net users. And it seems to me to be related to the idea of prominent webloggers not being channels, but content for channels. Aggregated weblog content, either bespoke for individuals (cf. desktop aggregators like NetNewsWire or developed Blogdex style to provide the net's best take on the very best links and commentary available each day - these seem to me to be the next stage models of channels. Modular sites that compete with one another to provide the best mix or the most accurately interesting information each and every day seem to be the wave of the future. And this is what I mean by us being potent and powerful together - the links that leap the species are the ones that achieve massive currency in weblogdom - the ones one everyone's sites. That's the power we have to harness and I think it's a power that dwarfs Glenn Reynolds or Jason Kottke and will continue to do so.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 1, 2003 12:22 PM

Clay - one other thing in your post that I really disagree with - you say this: "If what weblogs do - putting things out there for people to read - is good, then doing more of that is better, and some sites do more of it, a lot more, and that gap is increasing, not decreasing." In my experience of weblogging, you get more people reading you if you write relatively short pieces of good quality and insight than you do if you write lots. In fact, it might even be said that there is a fairly small saturation limit that people feel about getting content from any individual weblogger. People often read weblogs for the diversity of opinion and if you find your daily reading time increasingly colonised by one particularly fiesty writer, you end up skim-reading or getting bored of them. And interestingly, the most successful memes can be those that are just given time to be taken up. The more time a post is in a position of importance at the top of your site the more likely it is to be linked, the more likely it is that it'll reach that early tipping point and spread from one or two sites to blogdom in general and the more people will end up reading it.

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 2, 2003 11:41 AM

Tom: good job on the numbers. I checked the blogging ecosystem, as good a metric for the "first hundred" as any, and the first blog I found after #100 that had a public counter was Virginia Postrel -- whose extreme tracker daily average is 1044. But I would agree with you: although the ecosystem list has a number of old-school early bloggers on it (you're at #90), it also has some recent stars. Many are in the instapundit orbit of political blogs, but still others are not. Creative Commons, a relatively new project, is at #15 (which isn't strictly fair, perhaps, given its linkback nature by default). By the way, the number of linkbacks required to remain on the list of 500 seems to rise by about one a week; it's now at 50.

→ Posted by: Dan Hartung at February 3, 2003 5:51 AM

Clay's argument that 'the blogosphere is elitist and will soon become mainstream media' contains two generalizations that should be untangled. a) Yes, Clay is probably right that 5% of the blogs will always account for 50% of blog traffic. But it is wrong to talk about "The" blogosphere. We'll certainly have hundreds of blogospheres, each with its own elite and power law distribution. And we don't need to worry about stasis any time soon. These new spheres will be emerging for a long time. Glenn Reynolds obviously won't be the hub for French bloggers, and BoingBoing won't be the hub for evangelical Christians. New bloggers will invent and serve new spheres. b) Clay suggests that because mainstream media is elitist (ie governed by the power law), all elitest media is mainstream media. "As we get used to weblogs, they will become mainstream media too, and will take on the trappings of mainstream media," he says.

Sure the blogospheres may each display elitist traffic distrubutions. But Clay's equation of blogs and mainstream media elides the many traits -- links, chronology, personality, blogrolls, 95% lower overheads, Google-friendliness, trackbacks -- that make blogs different from (and subversive of) today's dominant media, aka "mainstream media." Lumping the two classes of media together is like declaring, 1.5 million years ago, that "homo erectus shares traits with the ape, so we can safely ignore their differences." What makes blogs unique? I'll advance the argument that a key difference between blogs and today's media is corporate structure. As media organisms, blogs have shorter life-cycles, smaller metabolisms and are run by flexible egos. Up against the old, thick-shell, high-burn, multi-cell media organisms, the blog is an ideal candidate to evolve and exploit new media challenges. Weird, subversive, new things will come to pass.

→ Posted by: Henry Copeland at February 3, 2003 2:16 PM

I don't know whether it was this conversation or another that inspired Clay to write Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality, but either way it's a very interesting and well-researched development on some of the thoughts we've been investigating here...

→ Posted by: Tom Coates at February 8, 2003 7:59 PM