mark nottingham

Blogging Zipf

Sunday, 26 January 2003

I always wondered why so many people had their blogs’ comments and even trackback indicators turned off. Go ahead and surf around; it’s a rare blog indeed, at least in my experience, that has these features visible for the world to see.

It’s obvious, now that i’ve actually had a blog (OK, it’s about as healthy as the plant in the living room that I Really Should Water Soon, but I think this goes even for healthy blogs). It’s that most people don’t get comments. Or trackbacks. There’s pretty fierce competition for links, going by some of the shameless stunts I see out there, and the fact is that most posts on most blogs pass by without a whisper.

After a while, this gets the goat of your average blogger, especially since so many people seem to consider their blog an extension of their ego. “How DARE the world not comment on and/or link to the things I deem most important?”

So, these features quietly get turned off. Oh, yes, comments can be abused, indeed. But I don’t think that’s the real reason.

I’d like to see some research on this. In a former life, I spent a lot of time poring of Web traffic logs, research regarding the traffic distribution of the Internet, popularity clustering, hit locality and the like.

So, a number of questions comes to mind when thinking about blogs and linking. What is the distribution of links to blogs? People doing the linking? How much linking is reciprocal? How do links between blogs cluster, and how isolated are those clusters?

Let’s just say that the word “Zipf” comes to mind very quickly for a lot of these questions.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to figure out how to turn these dang things off…