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November 9, 2007

| City Life >>

Awesomeness = f(Small Blocks)

Significantly less fun than the previous post, but I’ve gotta admit, this bit from Steven Berlin Johnson in his kottke.org interview is sort of one of the best descriptions of what I like about the web, ever:

SBJ: One of the great things that Jane Jacobs wrote about in Life and Death of the Great American Cities is the design principle of favoring short blocks over longer ones — the crooked streets of the Village versus the big avenues of Chelsea — because short blocks diversify the flow of pedestrian traffic. In an avenue system, everyone feeds onto the big streets, and you have insanely overcrowded streets and then side streets that are deserted (which leads to storefront real estate that only the big chains can afford, and real estate that no one wants because there’s not enough foot traffic). In a short block model, the streets tend to gravitate towards that middle zone where there are always some people on them, but not too many.

I’ve always thought that the blogosphere can be thought of as a kind of small blocks model for the Web, whereas the original portal idea was much more of a big avenues model. Yes, there are some increasing returns effects that lead to some A-list bloggers having millions of visitors, and yes, there is a long tail of bloggers who have almost no traffic. But the healthiest part of the curve is what Dave Sifry once called “the big butt” — the middle zone between the head and tail of the Power Law distribution, all those sites with 1000 to 100,000 readers. That’s the part of the blogosphere that I think is really cause for celebration, because something like that just didn’t exist before on that scale. And as Yochai — who of course is very smart about all this — points out: those mid-list sites also communicate up the chain to the A-listers, who can broadcast out the interesting developments in the mid-list so that those stories enter a broader public dialogue.

Always worth remembering it didn’t have to be this way. We could have ended up with a much more craptastic top-down internet, like a sort of Super-AOL-Prodigy, or something. We lucked out!

Robin-sig.gif
Posted November 9, 2007 at 7:30 | Comments (0) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted, Media Galaxy
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