BlogShares: O Mercado de Blogues

Danusia R. @ 1.5.2007 @ Fun, Internet, Recomendações @

I did not know this site. Just today, early in the morning, I was navigating on BUZZNET (wich has even more strange & wonderful profiles than MySpace does) and the system asked for my BlogShares account. I didn’t know what it was. Then, of course, I typed on my Firefox: http://blogshares.com, and there it was. An online stock marketing… for blogs! How amazing is that? I created my account and I severely recommend you to create yours. It’s gonna be HUGE! And besides, I really LOVED what they say about the reason BlogShares was created. Check it out!

BlogShares was written in early 2003 by Seyed Razavi in his free time. The overall objective of BlogShares is the exploration of an emerging social network while providing an addictive and fun environment for bloggers to join and help add to the worth of the social network. Another one of the purposes of this site was to prove the Power Law theory. Part of this theory is based on the fact that 20% of the population holds 80% of the wealth. This can also be attributed to weblogs, 20% of the blogs contain 80% of all incoming links. BlogShares hits a home run with this theory.

Okay. I was totally amazed by what Clay said about The Power Law theory. It’s beautiful. It’s huge. It totally fits the world we live today. Here you’ll read some lines about this amazing theory, but again - I totally recommend that you read all the article. I’m not gonna make any comments about that because I believe most of the people that know me already knows I’m a feminist, pro-choice, anti-Bush, anti-war, I don’t like capitalism (but hey, I know I live in a capitalist world okay?) and I truly believe money can bring out the worst of the people. I love money, of course, but it corrupts. No doubt about it. But… why can’t we use capitalism in our favor? Why can’t exist a sustainable capitalism, right? And why can’t we bring this to the online world? Let’s make our blogs bigger! Let’s generate traffic for us and for other bloggers! For example, everyone that puts a link to hipermoderna… i put a link back. I think it’s THE LEAST I can do - if the person liked my blog so much that he/she linked me. Right? Well, less talk, more action. Here it is some words of wisdom to you.

Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
First published February 8, 2003 on the “Networks, Economics, and Culture” mailing list.
Version 1.1: Changed 02/10/03 to point to the updated “Blogging Ecosystem” project, and to Jason Kottke’s work using Technorati.com data. Added addendum pointing to David Sifry’s “Technorati Interesting Newcomers” list, which is in part a response to this article.

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.
Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.
In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

So… what are you waiting for? If you, like me, consider your blog AMAZING but underestimated, join BlogShares NOW! And be happy! =) Even if my traffic doesn’t change… it’s worth it only because of the concept of BlogShares.