In the August 1st edition of OLDaily, Stephen Downes does the e-learning community a great service. (I would have provided a hyperlink to the edition, but the site doesn’t seem to have conventional permalinks and the page hasn’t been rolled over to the persistent site archives yet. Poke around at http://www.downes.ca and you’ll find it pretty easily.) He provides a list of e-learning weblogs that do not yet have inbound links, which gives them very low ratings on Technorati (and probably also means that they don’t show up well on Google searches). These sites tend to get ignored because…well…they have been ignored already, and people tend to gravitate toward sites that have traffic. (As Downes points out, this is known as the Power Law. In addition to the Clay Shirky blog post that he references, Duncan Watts’ book Six Degrees has some good stuff on power laws in it.)
I, for one, intend to scan the list of blogs, subscribe to the RSS feeds of any that look promising, and look for opportunities to link to the worthwhile posts. I encourage all readers with their own weblogs to do the same.
