The Daypop Effect
Posted on:: December 29th, 2002
Much as I love DayPop, I can see that I’m contributing to its inaccuracy. If I see a link that’s in the DayPop Top 40, I won’t blog it unless I have something particular to say about it for I figure it’s being blogged all over the place anyway.Thus, according to the Law of Inconspicuous Fame (“True fame extinguishes mentions”), height and persistence on the Top 40 tends to defeat itself.
Try out the Technorati Sidebar. Plunk in an URL and it will show you all the blogs that refer to it. (Well, all the blogs that Technorati tracks: 18,178 of ’em at last count.)
Categories: Uncategorized dw
I disagree and counter with the Law of There are More People on the Net Than You Can Possibly Imagine (“For everyone person who doesn’t blog the link there are N who will”).
I’m sure if I had a modicum of statistical background, I could retort with more actual data than wit.
As someone who follows a similar guideline (if it’s on Blogdex, don’t blog it), I have two points.
It’s only “inaccuracy”, IMO, if it’s making your Web behavior disordinately different from your meatspace behavior. Consider — if everyone at a physical gathering is gossiping about a particular topic, does that make you less likely to bring it up later because it’s getting old? Same thing here.
This effect, if widespread, would be a nice counter to the Self-Fulfilling GoogleRank Effect (which someone can think of a better name for, surely). This is where Webloggers looking for a page to link to on a particular topic will tend to choose one from near the top of Google’s results. Over time, that will make PageRank distribution more extreme, as pages which have lots of Googlejuice get linked to even more often, and GoogleJuiceless pages get linked less often.
— mpt
Thanks for the plug of the Technorati Sidebar. I’m glad that you’re finding it useful! Keep up the great blogging, you’re becoming a daily read for me…
Dave