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# Celebrity in social networks: how can we avoid the power law distribution?
- URL: https://werd.io/celebrity-in-social-networks-how-can-we-avoid-the-power-law-distribution/
- Published: 2006-03-01T13:22:55.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-12T11:01:24.000Z
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: General, #ben-684a32da145d7d001be71dae, #Migrated-1749693130536, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2025-06-11 21:52

In any information ecosystem, there is an observable tendency for a few sources on a topic - be they journals, websites or people - to have a massive following, a significantly smaller number to have a medium number of followers, and then a final, largest group to have a much smaller number of regular readers. This can be witnessed in the [Technorati Top 100](http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/): the top 100 blogs range from around 80,900 unique links to 4,900 (quite a decrease), yet Technorati track 26.6 million sites. If the downward link trend continues across all 26.6 million, most weblogs have at most one a handful of links - and therefore a correspondingly small number of readers. I've been wondering for a while how best to verbalise this.  
  
Following [this article in New York Magazine](http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/15967/) \- an interesting read in itself about the new breed of commercial blog media, and how the only really profitable commercial blogs are the first to cover a topic - I came across Clay Shirky's 2003 article about [Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality](http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw%5Fweblog.html).