the magic middle
I’ve never been fond of the notion that “power laws” dictate what blogs are read. To be more precise I don’t like the conclusion that most blogs will languish on the far reaches of the “long tail” because network effects lead to a situation where a very small minority of blogs are read by a wide audience and most blogs have only a few readers. This seems to suggest that blogs with a small readership have little influence.
Technorati CEO Dave Sifry debunks that notion in a post about “The Magic Middle,” the blogs that fall in the middle of the blog power curve. Based on his analysis of data about blogs collected by Technorati, he argues that most of the conversation is going on among these blogs. Moreover, this is the area where expert and topical blogs reside. Sitting atop the power curve is meaningless if you’re looking for consistent and targeted information. I’ve long thought this way. A blog about, say, media studies and the Internet, isn’t competing for bOINGbOING’s readers, so why should they be compared in terms of “power”? And why should this be a measure of the blog’s worth?
Sifry defines “the magic middle” as blogs with 20 to 1000 inbound links, which seems like an overly broad definition for a category. (Blogs with 1000 links have to be qualitatively different than blogs with 20 links.) Sadly, Technorati says I only have links from 14 other blogs, so apparently I am still in blog Siberia.
