I thought you might have mentioned that "Jon tried in vain to sum up the whole greplaw thing..." I tried, twice. :-)

Jon

I decided I'd just let that pass. The Greplaw topic really needs a whole follow-up post of its own.

You're kind of a bigsmallwig. You're not actually that far out in the tail, and I'll bet you get linked from a lot more bigwigs than the random blogger. After all, how many of the millions of bloggers rated a mention by Garfunkel?

Ah, but the implications of the exponential distribution are that the Short Head has virtually all the focused attention. The difference between 3,500 and 350 is MUCH more than the difference between 350 and 35.

Sure, there's a difference between a little fish and a minnow. But there's a much bigger difference between both of them, and a shark.

I think it's better to focus on the oligarchical feudal structure, that blogdom is fiefdoms ruled by a small cadre of royalty, than to try to take comfort that I'm not the lowliest serf in the land.

The long tail argument has a lot of merit Seth. The problem being that top blogs on the left and the right tend to re-enforce each other.

But there are serveral other axes in the blog world, notably, expertise, location, sometimes religion, and a variety of others.

A trout is a top predator in a small lake, a shark would die of starvation. The trick of it is to be the trout and stay in the lake.

Jay, while the sentiment is kind, see what I wrote in:

Blog power law and big fish / small ponds

Notably:

"... if it's all big fish in small ponds, that still matters in your pond, and being told "Go find another pond" dodges the problem."

Looks like we've beaten that fish to death...