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 five books. In early 2007 I went and foolishly got myself a day job running the hyperlocal community site, outside.in that I co-founded the year before. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 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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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