Having experienced the blogosphere for only these few months, I would find it difficult to locate an inherent laziness in the selection of other blogs to follow. It takes time and work to stay in the blogosphere, both posting my own stuff (which I don't do daily at all, or even anything close to it) and reading and responding to others. I think blogrolls become like citation pages - you put certain ones on there when you hear about them because you already perceive them as important or cool by other means, but you don't always follow all the links you keep. So while the top of the curve group might become simple broadcast mechanisms (which is, I think, what some of them want--Seth Grodin, for example, doesn't allow comments on his blog entries), the middle or bottom of the curve might become pass through sites, links passively set and never personally engaged. But even if they are, I don't think that necessarily suggests a default to groupthink. It seems more like watching CNN even though you prefer to get your news from some alternative and smallish independent source.

I think the system tends to retain its form even if any one participant falls off because a distribution is like that. As Shirkey begins to detail, the Pareto Prinicple is everywhere. In business, we used it as a model for improving efficiency. (The general rule being that 80% of your effectiveness comes from 20% of your workforce, or 80% of your business come from 20% of your customers or clients, etc.) In image consulting, we had the same principle for the average woman's wardrobe. Most women wear 20% of their clothing 80% of the time (leaving 80% of their wardrobe virtually unused, leading to the advice of going shopping in your closet). Historically, I think you can find many examples of the curve holding its shape even if the players at the top change. There is actually a certain Marxist theoretical quality to that idea that I'm surprised to say actually makes some sense to me. The conditions start to govern the choices, which further reinforce the dominant order, etc.

I followed the note link in Shirkey's article, and then its Weblog history link to Rebecca Blood's essay on blog history. There's a theme here that somewhat resembles the use of other aspects of the internet, e-mail, and the world wide web. There are some early users who are primarily "techies," or government or corporate types, followed by business applications on a separate development path from personal users, which begins to stratify the particular technology. Web pages come to mind. E-mail, text messaging, and now blogging.

I think the conversational aspect of blogging versus the business or media aspects of blogging demonstrate the power law in action very nicely. The links I followed last week centered on the idea of branding, and blogging being yet another tool for branding oneself in the marketplace, whether that market is busines or academic seems immaterial to me. Getting known, getting connected, getting "traffic" seems to be the goal in either case. Either is a different use of blogs than the sometimes anonymous and conversational tone of more personal blogs like LJ.