I'm going to be talking a little about power law distributions at this talk I'm giving on Monday at Adaptive Path's User Experience Week in DC, and it occured to me that it would be interesting to look at a comparison between the links directed to the top 100 blogs on Technorati, and album sales for the Billboard top 100. I think it would be interesting to see which medium has more dominant hits -- is BoingBoing more powerful than, say, Mariah Carey? Has anyone seen that comparison done somewhere? If not, does anyone have the sales data for the Billboard chart handy? I can get the rankings online but not the albums sales...
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- 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.)
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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
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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!
You might be better off looking at the Soundscan data ( http://www.soundscan.com/ ) than the Billboard data. Not sure about albums but the singles charts are actually generated by a combination of sales plus airplay and perhaps a few other factors, while soundscan is pure sales data.
Posted by: Abe | August 10, 2006 at 09:44 AM
I did this kind of analysis 3 years ago before I came to work at Technorati:
http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/powerlaws.html
Chris Anderson redid the movies chart on page 128 of Long Tail, after I showed him it.
Looking at the top 100 alone is a bit daft in power law terms, but often all you can get.
The full power law today:
http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/blogpower2.swf
and from a year ago
http://homepage.mac.com/kevinmarks/blogpower.swf
My apologies for the encoding glitch on the chinese in the top blog.
Posted by: Kevin Marks | August 10, 2006 at 05:04 PM