November 17, 2003

More on "Weblog Incest"

Jonathan Wilde at Catallarchy.net has a great response to Jennifer Howard's article. Jonathan writes,

There is absolutely nothing democratic about blogs. Rather, the blogosphere is the ultimate free-market anarchy. Bloggers are vendors and ideas are their wares. Readers who spend their time reading blogs are free to choose which blogs they visit, and they are free to never come back again, just like the customer who never re-visits the restaurant that served him cold pasta.

Ralph Luker describes the blogsphere well:

The blogosphere is like a library in which books offering competing interpretations of things sit quietly beside each other until you open them up and the dialogue begins.

I would just add that since some kind of network principle underlies much of Man's social behavior (have read little on this topic so bear with me) it's natural for there to be hubs or link concentrations. I suspect it has something to do with people having limited time to deal with an unlimited amount of information. We need ways to filter all this stuff. Popular weblogs like Instapundit do just that. But since the blogosphere is in essence an anarchy, Glenn's popularity depends on him continuing to produce useful content.

A flaw in Howard's (I'll use her last name since she feels webloggers use first names too casually) analysis is the list of weblogs she uses to prove her point. For example. Old Hag my be popular in Howard's world, but it's a "Crawly Amphibian" in N.Z. Bear's ecosystem with only 17 unique inbound links. The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has even less link popularity with only two unique inbound links. In comparison, TAM is ranked 357th with 103 unique inbound links. That's not big time, but it certainly makes TAM a giant compared to those Howard mentioned. If she would have mentioned all the linking between the big time webloggers like Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, the Volokh gang, and Kevin Drum then she'd have some credibility. Instead, she looks like a Big Media writer who doesn't know what she's talking about.

"The Blogosphere: a Free-Market Anarchy"