Time for a little thinking out loud.
The "blogosphere" is a network, as the previous entry points out. Networks have been the subject of considerable study in economics especially since the arrival of the modern Internet. One lesson stands out: the value of a network grows more quickly than the size of the network.
This idea has often been expressed as Metcalfe's Law, which states that the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of users. As a rule of thumb, that's fine, and it certainly is easy to remember, but in reality it might be far more or less than that. Metcalfe's Law is based on the observation that the number of 2 way conversations in a network is equal to N(N-1). That is, if you have N telephones in the network, each of those N telephone users, can call one of the other (N-1) users. Hence, there are N(N-1) 2 way conversations that are possible.
This "Law" says nothing, however, about the social value that is created by these connections. If you have a phone that you use only for emergencies, it doesn't add as much social value to the system as a phone that is used frequently to connect you with many friends and business contacts.
So what is the value of the "blogosphere"? There are about 4 million blogs listed on Technorati. Thousands have only a handful of readers, while a handful of blogs have thousands of readers. This isn't a standard telephone. Popular blogs are like a 50,000 Watt radio station, capable of selling advertising, and maybe even able to compete with traditional media. Most are probably less significant than the bulletin board over the company water cooler.
Figuring out the value of the blogosphere is not a trivial problem that can be reduced to Metcalfe's Law.
But as events of the last few days illustrate, there is something new going on. Bloggers became part of the story about the CBS documents. Some might say that it's premature to call this a "revolution", but clearly Joe Trippi doesn't think so.
Think about this: you can go to a news aggregator and subscribe to all your favorite newspapers and blogs. Then, every morning, you listen to the largest conversation in the world -- a party line for the ages-- filtered to give you just the keywords you want, and you have a voice in that conversation.
What is the value of that?
To be continued...
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