Supplemented by Steve Hsu, a rant on how few people get the training to really understand distributions, which are increasingly important in everyday life. This reminds me of my foray into tagging, where I had to dust off my own understanding of distributions. On the one hand, the fact is that the topic can just [...]
In a conversation related to my previous postings on power laws, a question came up: If a ranked distribution follows a power law, what percentage of the total is in the highest ranked bin? So for the example of a histogram of users ranked by the % of taggings, what percentage M of all taggings [...]
When I saw Ethan put Nivi’s matrix into NumSum, I thought it was so cool that I had to take up Mike’s request to stick some of his thought-provoking wishlist into the matrix as well. Here’s my attempt: I got rid of the “expert” scope column, not because it’s not relevant, but because there weren’t [...]
I don’t mean to harp on this one, but I’m still seeing a lot of potentially misleading statements out there concerning “power laws” and “long tails.” One of the most prolific writers on this topic is Clay Shirky, so I’ll use a recent comment of his as an example (sorry to pick on Clay, but [...]
OK, I finally cleared up what was bothering me about those long tail graphs, prompted by Phil‘s comment and helped a lot by this article. The issue is that long tail graphs have an x axis comprised of items ranked by their y axis value; e.g. for a social bookmarking site we can graph users [...]
In a previous post, I mentioned some interesting graphs that could be made from public URL tagging data such as that at del.icio.us. I keep wanting to see these graphs, so I figured I’d post some details and issue a request / challenge / wheedle to the real hackers out there to slap something together. [...]
Clay Shirky posted a great essay on social tagging vs. expert categorization. Tagging is a particularly interesting example of “stuff about stuff” being valuable, because it includes two extra ingredients: social network effects and the ability to address the “long tail” of both content and meaning. In a system like del.icio.us where each person can [...]