A Long Tail battle

Bob Wyman talks about problem’s he’s noticing with ranking on the long tail:

If Matt had been able to see the full set of millions of ranks that we compute, he would have noticed a second “region” of very stable ranks. That region is at the bottom of the ranking scale — sites that never get linked to by anyone. The harsh reality is that those with the lowest ranks tend to stay that way. Those with the highest rank tend to keep their high rank.

Hm. I don’t see this to be very interesting though. These are probably just new blogs and people aren’t doing much to increase their inbound links. The majority of the thin tail would/should have an indegree of zero.

Matt Hurst has more on this:

It suggests, not surprisingly, that the higher you are ranked, the less likely you are to change rank – or the more stable the rank is.

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And Bob finishes with a great quote:

The problem is that in almost all rankable systems that deal with information and ideas, the stuff at the top is where you’ll find things that everyone already knows about or, those at the top of the scale tend to reflect points-of-view that are well known, broadly accepted and are generally predictable… Unfortunately, you can’t just invert things and look at the bottom ranks as an alternative. The “signal-to-noise” ratio down there isn’t very good…

The really useful place to look, if new information or new ideas is that you’re interested in, is the middle ranks. As Aristotle said long ago: “Seek the mean.” That’s where the good stuff is.

I couldn’t agree more. This is why I like blogs. The middle ground is very compelling. I can read diverse and interesting topics from passionate people. I don’t care about the short head. I don’t subscribe to anyone on the Technorati Top 100. If there’s something good there I’ll find it on another blog and hit it on a random walk while using my aggregator.