Listing entries tagged with power_law

blogburst   04.10.2006, 4:14 PM

A small Austin, TX-based company called Pluck is launching a new blog aggregation service called BlogBurst that will filter postings from hundreds of approved bloggers and syndicate their content to major news services (and eventually smaller niche publications as well). Tomorrow, BlogBurst lets rip its fire hose of content at a handful of major newspapers including USA Today publisher Gannett Co., The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and local pubs The Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express. Some are calling this a further blurring of the boundary between mainstream and independent medias. Seems to me more like an expansion of the umbrella of the former and a buttressing of the oft-lamented "power law" with regard to the latter (how the most popular blogs get entrenched in an "A-list" in spite of popular belief a level playing field). The AP has more.

Any blogger can sign up with BlogBurst but some editorial body there decides which blogs go into the syndication feed. Presumably, if the thing takes off, they'll start breaking it up into multiple feeds -- some generalized, some specialized. Participating publishers are povided with "editorial management tools" called the "publisher workbench." So if I'm a newspaper, I receive a daily dump of thousands of blog postings, broken down into different topic areas. I fiddle around with those in the workbench, choose the ones I want, and then plug them into various slots in my paper. Technically, it works like this (warning, acroynum blitz):

Content from the BlogBurst network is easily integrated into your site via simple JavaScript calls or robust SOAP or XML APIs.

Incidentally, the name blogburst is a bit of co-opted net jargon describing any coordinated effort by bloggers to flood the web with postings on a particular topic -- usually some hot-button issue like the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. Search "blogburst" today on Technorati and you'll find a slew of right wing bloggers on a "guard the borders" rhetorical rampage (ha! idealistic me, I initially thought they meant the borders between mainstream and grassroots media!).

Meanwhile, as I write, thousands march down Broadway in New York -- blogging, as it were, with their feet -- in support of America's illegal immigrants.

I wonder how the two-capital-Bs BlogBurst will deal with the political polarization of blogs.

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:14 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
tags: Blogosphere , RSS , aggregation , blogburst , blogging , immigration , journalism , media , newspaper , power_law , syndication , technorati

the web is like high school   04.20.2005, 11:20 AM

Social networking software is breeding a new paradigm in web publishing. The exponential growth potential of group forming networks is shifting the way we assign value to websites. In paper entitled "That Sneaky Exponential--Beyond Metcalfe's Law to the Power of Community Building" Dr. David P. Reed, a computer scientist, and discoverer of "Reed's Law," a scaling law for group-forming architectures, says: "What's important in a network changes as the network scale shifts. In a network dominated by linear connectivity value growth, "content is king." That is, in such networks, there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content (published stories, published images, standardized consumer goods). Where Metcalfe's Law dominates, transactions become central. The stuff that is traded in transactions (be it email or voice mail, money, securities, contracted services, or whatnot) are king. And where the GFN law dominates, the central role is filled by jointly constructed value (such as specialized newsgroups, joint responses to RFPs, gossip, etc.)."

Reed makes a distinction between linear connectivity value growth (where content is king) and GFNs (group forming networks, like the internet) where value (and presumably content) is jointly constructed and grows as the network grows. Wikipedia is a good example, the larger the network of users and contributors the better the content will be (because you draw on a wider knowledge base) and the more valuable the network itself will be (since it has created a large number of potential connections). He also says that the value/cost of services or content grows more slowly than the value of the network. Therefore, content is no longer king in terms of return on investment.

Does this mean that the web is becoming more like high school, a place where relative value is assigned based on how many people like you? And where popularity is not always a sign of spectacular "content." You don't need to be smart, hard-working, honest, nice, or interesting to be the high-school "it" girl (or boy). In some cases you don't even have to be attractive or rich, you just have to be sought-after. In other words, to be popular you have to be popular. That's it.

SO...if vigorously networked sites are becoming more valuable, are we going to see a substantial shift in web building strategies and goals--from making robust content to making robust cliques? Dr. Reed would probably answer in the affirmative. His recipe for internet success: "whoever forms the biggest, most robust communities will win."

Posted by kim white at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: Education , high_school , network , p2p , popularity , power_law , the_networked_book , web