Power Laws on the Internet
This Guardian article is about the ubiquity of the effects of the power law on the internet. The author points out that although people tend to characterize things in terms of averages, the normal distribution is not all that common in many aspects of society. Some examples of power laws on the internet were the few website giants that have very large numbers of in-links while most have only a few and how a couple of blogs have attracted a majority of readers while the rest have very little.
The author also mentioned a more specific case known as the Pareto Principle, involving ratios of 80/20 that for instance has been found to apply to land ownership in Italy where 20% of the population owned 80% of the country’s land. This connects to what we learned in class about the power law as well as the rich get richer principle. The power law is illustrated by the long tail graph, displaying how a minimal number of items/people/etc have extensive popularity while most things have very little popularity. Something I found particularly interesting was that how popular something becomes is not necessarily attributed to specific properties as suggested by outcome of the Music Lab experiment when the number of listens to each song was not revealed to the listener.
link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/06/power-laws-internet-john-naughton