stevenberlinjohnson.com: Empower Law

I'm inclined to agree with Clay Shirky that the growing power law distribution of the blogging world -- which basically means that a certain inequality of attention is built into the system right now -- is Not Necessarily A Bad Thing, or at least that the current system, in Clay's words, is "mostly fair." But the most interesting thing to me about Clay's essay -- and the subsequent response -- is that the active participants in the power law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.

Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don't have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don't have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose. We hear a lot about architecture being destiny in the digital world, but the fact is that architecture has never been more flexible, and there have never been so many connected smart people interested in flexing its joints for good causes. A few years ago, when I was writing in Emergence about the limitations of the one-way linking built into the Web, there were very few practical applications out there that attempted to remedy this flaw. Now the web is teeming with them (Trackbacks, various Google hacks, Blogdex.) To a certain extent, the increased feedback of two-way linking may have amplified the scale-free phenomena that Clay describes. But the key point is that the one-way architecture isn't necessarily our destiny anymore, partially because some very smart people started to think that two-way links would be better for the system as a whole, and they set out to add them to mix.

So the question that I'm wrestling with is this: let's say we decided that the existing power-law distribution isn't quite fair enough, or that there's some other justification for encouraging a more egalitarian spread (equality of results, and not just opportunity.) If we decided that this was our goal, how would we go about doing it? What architectural changes would fight against the power law trend, without doing it in a command-and-control kind of way? Clay's piece suggests that perhaps the distribution is inevitable, but I doubt it. Clearly, to get a more even spread, there has to be a mechanism that amplifies the signal of new arrivals, since the 80/20 split is usually the result of early arrivals getting a disproportionate share of subsequent links.

Just to start things off, here's one idea I had today, inspired by a fascinating conversation over coffee with Meg: keep separate tabs on blogroll links and pointing-to-a-specific-story links ("story links" for short.) Then create a public ranking of sites with a high ratio of incoming story links to incoming blogroll links. So when Dave Winer, who has 1504 blogs pointing to him right now according to Technorati, manages to get 100 people to point to a new entry, it's no big news. But when Joe Newcomer, who is only mentioned on five blogrolls, manages to write something that gets twenty links -- that's a front page story. The great and powerful Sifry, as you might expect, is already working on something like this at Technorati, though his criteria is a little different.

The beauty of the model is that it creates a kind of "hot prospects" index, highlighting blogs that are punching above their weight. Then all you have to do is persuade the A-list bloggers to run an RSS feed of the index in their sidebar. It wouldn't change Jason's charts overnight, but it would be a start.

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of seven books, and co-founder of three web sites. We spend most of the year in Marin County, California though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbeej at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

My Books

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
An exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books. Sold more copies in hardcover than anything else I've written.
The Invention of Air
The story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals.
The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!

Comments

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