Blogging With Power Laws
In the business world, it is often the smallest of companies that unleash innovative ideas and methodologies to the masses (however small they may be). In general, the smaller player has the advantage because of their nimble infrastructure and their ability to adapt to emerging trends and other fads. In contrast, the larger, established corporations have longer, deeper roots which often requires more strenuous effort to "sprint" towards new concepts. However, the ability to truly spread information is usually hindered by other forces -- the largest node has the upper hand in this regard.
In the blogging world, "power laws" rule the topology and the same effect can be seen. There are thousands and thousands of innovative thinkers scattered across the blogosphere. Unfortunately, spreading a message to the community at large is often hindered as a result of size and distribution. The solution -- amplifiers. To bootstrap their positions and roles, bloggers seeking the position on the Thought Leadership Totem Pole require the assistance and acknowledgement of those more entrenched. The ability to feed information to the top only helps to levitate the individual's standing.
There's a catch, though -- elevation requires attribution. If the message is co-opted by others without proper credit, the influence of the author is nullified. One might think that in a "socially responsible" network such as the blogosphere that this would not happen often, but new research at HP seems to indicate otherwise.
Wired News reports:
Using newly developed techniques for graphing the flow of information between blogs, the researchers have discovered that authors of popular blog sites regularly borrow topics from lesser-known bloggers -- and they often do so without attribution.
These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that "infect" large populations. Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group.
"There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen to the important people," said Lada Adamic, one of the four researchers working on the project.
The path to "importance" may be even harder and steeper than already perceived. The question is how strongly will it influence any particular prospective author's willingness to contribute.