E-Business Weblog/Newsfeed

Clay Shirky's power law curve shows that there are a relative handful of weblogs that are very highly read, and then there's an elbow and the curve flattens out. And most weblogs, the vast, vast, vast majority of them (the long tail, as Chris Anderson of Wired called it) are read by a few people. So the media looks at that curve and it says, "Aha! On the left-hand side where the big-time bloggers are, those are being read by hundreds of thousands of people. They're like media. Weblogs are like media!" Maybe they're competitive, maybe they're helpful to media, but they look like media to the media. And so then the media asks, well, the media-ish questions like, are they credible, are they edited. Those are media questions that have very little to do with the social phenomenon of weblogging that is the long tail of weblogging.