e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: scalefree-networks

  • RSS and the Power Law

    I share James Farmer’s frustration that some of the Power Law blogs don’t have RSS feeds. There was a time when I would regularly surf dozens of sites every day to see if they had been updated but that time has long passed. Now, with my beloved NetNewsWire RSS newsreader, I can skim updates from a half a dozen sites in the same amount of time that it takes me to surf to one site using my browser to see if it even has an update.

    (By the way, Dear Reader, if you do not use an RSS feed reader then you simply must get with the 21st Century. Particularly if you are a news junky, I guarantee that it will change your life. Probably the easiest way to start would be with an online service like Bloglines. Alternatively, just Google the problem to find a reader that meets your particular needs and works on your particular computer platform.)

    At any rate, I’d love to see somebody do a study correlating Technorati ratings with the presence or absence of an RSS feed for a given site.

  • Help Break the Power Law: Downes Leads the Way

    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.