I’ve detested the ego-centric desire to see where one ranks on the food chain, but also have been irresistibly drawn to do the deplorable thing myself (regardless of how often I tell myself it doesn’t matter what my rank is on the Gurudaq.com index, I find myself checking if I slipped down from #34 – or gained a rank or two!)

From “The Long Tail”, I understood how economic and social rewards for being ranked high might drive such ‘hit’ mentality thinking – but then, aren’t we entering the ‘long tail’ era where this shouldn’t matter much?

Dr.Mani

When I fix the bugs in my Perl script I’ll probably get a totally different top 40, by the way. Whee!

I think we had somewhat different reasoning there, but it came out to the same result.

I don’t believe we actually disagree over the existence of (per-topic) “power-law”, that’s an empirical fact.

Where we’re never going to agree is about what implications flow from this …

[P.S. The Techmeme BigheadBoard, like the Technorati A-lister100, is a symbol - the map is not the territory, this is known. But messing up the map doesn't make the territory disappear]

For what little it’s worth, this blog is now gone from the Techmeme Top 100, which Dave says is being gamed all over the place.

Being an alpha blogger is like being an alpha paramecium.

You’re right. But being a Z-lister is like being a vacuole.

This is the cruelty of blog-evangelism. Influence is dangled before the audience, and when it’s shown to be a false promise, the marks are then criticized for their having been taken in the first place.

This has been gone over and over and over, and the aw-shucks disclaimers don’t change the fact there’s vast inequality and an exponential distribution of (per-topic) attention.

Don, you’re right. And I’m having fun going through your list(s).

And Matt, it’s Radio Userland. I’ll be getting a new Linux laptop soon, and I’ll need an OPML editor for that one too.