I came across this article at Ars Technica which points to a study that appears to refute claims of a ‘Googlearchy’ by Hindman and others. The key quote:

contrary to intuition and prior hypotheses, the use of search engines contributes to a more level playing field in which new sites have a greater chance of being discovered and thus of acquiring links and popularity.

Mhmm! More on this once I’ve had a chance to have a closer look at the article itself.

I think the crux of your argument (not the main one, the one in response to my question) is I might even go as far as to suggest that the blogs at the top of the ‘A-list’ are particularly good at fulfilling that role as distributors of attention - that users go to these blogs because they’re expert at keeping a finger on the pulse of what’s currently happening in their sphere of interest, and at providing commentary about it.

that seems true actually. good point.

are you studying the ways in which the australian blogosphere interacts with the US one (and more complex interactions along those lines) at all? i’ve found that quite interesting within the feminist blogosphere. actually would be something interesting to look at in terms of the history of feminism, i think. anyway if i start talking about that i’ll go on forever.

okay then.. back to thesis…

thanks for your comment. Starting with the obvious first - yes, eBay is very close to having established a monopoly on the kind of peer-to-peer trading it specialises in, and that’s increasingly a problem. There are also clear differences from the blogosphere (or from the media more generally) here, though - I’d suggest that there’s a great deal more user buy-in (and as a result, more prohibitive switching costs) for eBay than there are for blogs and other media products. On eBay, you and the people you trade with build up reputations, and the more you trust that reputation system (and eBay’s mechanisms in general), the more you’re going to miss it if you try to move to a different provider. So in a way, it’s us as users who sustain the monopoly - on average, we’re risk-averse and afraid of making the switch. That’s also true for Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and many other sites, of course.

For media sites, that’s not true to the same extent - yes, over time you know what to expect of a specific media outlet, but I don’t think there’s ever quite the same brand loyalty. For the mass media, monopolies (like, say, that of the Courier-Mail as the only print newspaper in Brisbane) aren’t sustained because readers wouldn’t switch to an alternative option if they had the choice; they’re sustained largely because it’s very expensive for a new competitor to set up shop and reach profitability (and News Ltd. would compete the hell out of them if they tried). So here, it’s the industry which sustains the monopoly - they’re the ones who are risk-averse, even though many of us would probably make the switch (and Fairfax’s current experiment with the online-only Brisbane Times is aimed at those people, of course).

In the case of eBay, for that reason, the best competition we’ve seen so far has come from sites which don’t quite take on eBay head-on, but specialise on the niches that eBay isn’t so interested in - auction sites for specific goods, and sites like Scoodi.com that take a specific hyperlocal approach. (Disclaimer: I’m in contact with Scoodi staff for a research project I hope to organise for my students during the next semester.)

Anyway, back to blogs, then: here, I think, user loyalty is weaker again (notwithstanding the fact that many of us follow a number of blogs very closely), and indeed, both from the viewpoint of the user and from that of the blogger, interlinkage with other sites is actually an indicator of quality.

This means that even if you only followed Anonymous Lefty, LP, Tim Blair, or any other well-known blog, you’d see links to other sites come up very regularly, which undermines Hindman’s ‘winners-take-all’ logic: ‘winners’ - i.e. ‘A-list’ blogs - might attract a significant number of readers, but as a core aspect of their blogging work then distribute that attention to other sites across the blogosphere… I might even go as far as to suggest that the blogs at the top of the ‘A-list’ are particularly good at fulfilling that role as distributors of attention - that users go to these blogs because they’re expert at keeping a finger on the pulse of what’s currently happening in their sphere of interest, and at providing commentary about it.

And I don’t know that alternatives to these very popular blogs are in fact so difficult to find: for one, because the popular blogs will often link to other sites that perhaps aren’t quite as popular; and on the other hand, because there’s nothing built into Google or any other search engine which prevents you from conducting a more specific search (something more sophisticated that ‘Australian politics blog’, say) to get a different set of results.

In fact, I think that’s another fallacy in some of the discussion which focusses strongly on the ‘A-list’ or the long tail of Google search terms: more specific searches (e.g. ‘Cairns blog’) are by definition less frequent on than more generic searches (e.g. ‘Australia blog’); that’s why we call them ‘more specific’…;-) But that doesn’t mean that they’re harder to conduct, or won’t produce useful results - in fact, the opposite may well be true. And (and that’s my central point here) for each of them there’s another long tail distribution with a few very popular sites and a long list of progressively less popular sites - good sites rise to the top (a different top) for these more specific searches just as much as they do for the more generic ones.

Hope that makes sense!

But I’m not entirely convinced either. I’m thinking about the comment about how google searching is democratic because the good ideas rise to the top - but the problem (?) seems to me that as you say sites become exponentially more popular. So if you’re looking for an alternative to the top of the list, they quickly become hard to find?

I just thought of this reading anonymous lefty this morning. He mentions that its impossible to find an alternative to ebay - and sites like ebay, facebook, etc only really work because they are (close to) monopolies on the market (the more monopolising they are the better they function).

I know blogs are different from ebay but that seemed to be something close to what I felt a bit unsure about reading your post… would be interested to know what you think