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SiliconValley.Com Heady dreams for diversity go unfulfilled on the Internet
"The Net has lived up to many of those early expectations. It's certainly changed my life -- and millions of others -- immeasurably for the better. But with that said, it's becoming increasingly clear that the Internet has not rewritten the rules of mass media. Not all of them. Not by a long shot.

Consider two rather arresting statistics from Alexa Internet, a San Francisco-based division of mighty Amazon.com. The company's primary product is a free service that furnishes supplementary hypertext links and other related information to Web surfers. To do the job, Alexa's robots attempt to ``crawl'' the entirety of the Web every two months. The most recent of these surveys counted 3.9 million Web host machines. (This is not, strictly speaking, to be equated with the total number of sites on the Web, since several host machines may constitute a single Web site.)

Alexa also looks at Web traffic. By examining usage patterns among its users -- 500,000 people in 109 countries -- the company can draw a pretty good bead on who's going where. What the company found recently may come as something of a shock: Eighty percent of all Web traffic is going to one half of one percent of all sites."

The New York Times On the Web, as Elsewhere, Popularity Is Self-Reinforcing
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"On the World Wide Web, the rich are getting richer.

Bringing new statistical support to an increasingly common Internet wisdom, two Xerox Corp. researchers have found that the most popular Web sites command by far the biggest share of Internet traffic -- a signature of what economists refer to as "winner take all" markets. "

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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