continuing the Discussion, i guess

Parts of Thursday morning’s session, “Disruption and disorientation”, and related links from the web.

“People don’t put obituary announcements on craigslist, they send them to the local newspaper. It’s not so much about the format of the newspaper, it’s about the community.”

GoogObits, a blog, takes obituaries from newspapers and “augments” them with google searches.

“While the media landscape is changing, the old models still apply. Point-to-point communication leads to a happy anarchic kingdom? But humans are very clumpy, clustery. The locus of the clumps is changing. Advertisers flock to those clumps. That’s the traditional media model.”

“Human nature is to cluster, human nature is also to fragment. If you go to Technorati, there’s very little at the top – it’s mostly fragmented.”

Weblogs and power laws, a post on a popular blog, elaborates on this pattern: there’s very few really popular blogs and many not popular blogs, with some in between:

Many systems and phenomena are distributed according to a power law distribution. A power law applies to a system when large is rare and small is common.

“Nobody outside of Metropolis cares about what goes into our newspaper. I don’t think there’s a business there. We could build around our strength – the strength of our community. We could build an economic future on the online.”

The Arcata Police Log, from the Arcata Eye Newspaper (“America’s most popular obscure small-town newspaper!”), is somewhat popular among bloggers. It has items like:

Sunday, February 22 1:08 a.m. One of the party favors at an east 15th Street wing-ding was a punch in the face, which broke a tooth.