Amplifying New Signals Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, and other things, asks the right question:
...So the question that I'm wrestling with is this: let's say we decided that the existing power-law distribution isn't quite fair enough, or that there's some other justification for encouraging a more egalitarian spread (equality of results, and not just opportunity.) If we decided that this was our goal, how would we go about doing it? What architectural changes would fight against the power law trend, without doing it in a command-and-control kind of way? Clay's piece suggests that perhaps the distribution is inevitable, but I doubt it. Clearly, to get a more even spread, there has to be a mechanism that amplifies the signal of new arrivals, since the 80/20 split is usually the result of early arrivals getting a disproportionate share of subsequent links...
Amplifying new signals, Dave Sifry's approach, is invaluable. But lets also recognize that helps the medium's health for publishing (Political Networks), while communication (Social Networks) and collaboration (Creative Networks) remain. And the real question is when social and creative network activity generate phase transitions into the political network.
6:02:04 PM 
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