Responsive to shocks

Many moons ago, Steven Den Beste complained that "a-list" bloggers (like Scripting.com) were hogging the limelight, and Clay Shirky was talking about how blog readership followed the power-law distribution, with just a few sites accounting for most of the eyeballs.

All of this was to suggest that the Internet, far from being a fluid medium, was ossifying into the old privileged hierarchies we see in the real world.

Then 9/11 happened, USS Clueless was catapulted into the limelight (as Steven knew something about Apache helicopters, and Scripting.com did not). The powerlaw turned out to reflect real (shiftable) interest, and not ossification. An equal opportunity world does not produce equal results.

I get the same feel from Unqualified Reservations that I used to get at USS Clueless before he became big.