Blog post #3 on Power Law
“Power Law in Popular Media” by Michael Tauberg: https://medium.com/@michaeltauberg/power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c
This article talks about the phenomenon of power law in real life. The author made an analogy to describe power law and its long tail: power law is like a forest, there are tall trees that soak up the sun and grow to be enormous; then there are all the shrubs on the forest floor. The author also talks about how power law comes into play in modern social media. Video games, music, books, and movies all follow the power law when you compare the popularity vs. # of items purchased/visited by consumers. So, why do power distributions form? The short answer is network effects and positive feedback loops. Popularity indeed is a network phenomenon. The author even referenced our course textbook in this article!
In lecture, we started talking about popularity and quantitatively measured it using the number of in-links/degrees. We then found that a power law probability distribution most accurately describes the popularity network, which agrees with the article mentioned above. Power law distribution is shown in a graph of # of items sold vs. items ordered in decreasing popularity. “The head” contains only a couple of very popular items that are sold to a lot of customers. “The long tail” contains a lot of items that are not so popular. This matches the forest analogy from the article. In class, we also talked about the “rich get richer” phenomenon and how pages can either link uniforms at random or choose to copy an earlier page i uniformly at random and link to the page i links to.