Ross Mayfield chimes in on the increasingly-complex discussion of power laws, inequality, and weblogs. My biggest question from all this: How, if at all, will the inequality change when more efficient ways to read weblogs are developed? Ross writes,
One design challenge for social software is extending the capabilities of people to hold a higher number of meaningful conversations and cultivate relationships.
Assuming we can meet that challenge, and you could read five or ten times as many weblogs as you read now, in the same time span, what would happen to the curve? As a weblog publisher, would it diversify the sites you link to, reducing its steepness? Or would it make it easier for more people to read all the popular sites (using Jason's example, Mary now has time for BoingBoing and MetaFilter) and increase the number of links to the more popular sites? That's what I'm wondering about, and I don't know the answer.