I’d like to thank Dean Esmay for linking to Clay Shirky’s fabulous post Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality in his own post of the same name. I’ve seen it referred to before but I hadn’t actually read it until now. I definitely agree when Dean writes:
The data used in the article is out of date. But I see no reason to believe that the trends it noted are anything other than self-evidently true today–or that they won’t still be true ten years from now. (Hey what do you know? Economics really is a science after all!)
A quick look at the TTLB Ecosystem certainly supports the claim.
From my own small point-of-view it’s great with me if Glenn gets a million hits an hour. He works very hard at it and he’s been doing it for some time. I visit his site several times daily and I think he’s earned the traffic. If Instapundit didn’t exist, we would be forced to create him.
For me the really neat thing is that—even with the power-law effect of blog traffic described in the link above—as the number of people reading and writing blogs increases even a small-fry like me who’s only been in operation for about eight months probably gets as much traffic as Glenn did after his first eight months of operation. That’s certainly more than I expected to get when I started out. As far as traffic goes I’ve already achieved the small goals I set for myself when I began.
The goal that I’m working on now is opening the discussion more and creating more of a community with the little coterie of bloggers and readers that I interact with most. That and becoming a better writer and more effective and more honest advocate. In my opinion those are goals that are really worth going after. And isn’t that the very best thing about blogging? Blogs are the perfect Horatio Alger universe. If you have the ability and you work hard enough you can achieve your heart’s desire.
