Jumping on the Cumulative Advantage Bandwagon

This article about Cumulative Advantage in The New York Times Magazine seems to be sparking quite the fervor on the web.

Authors are now convinced that website popularity and the structures of Web 2.0 are not based on quality of the content, but on popularity and randomness. Writers ask, are website such as Digg, (One that I honestly find useless the majority of the time.) MySpace and Blogs just part of a popularity explosion? Is connectivity telling us nothing about quality? (You can check out the embedded links for a couple of examples.)

First off, random does not necessarily mean poor. The article states that, "Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success." Its important to note that we're talking about music, so quality is also a somewhat relative term. The glass half empty use of "only a 50 percent chance" means that quality songs finished in the Top 5 half the time. Out of 48 songs that's a pretty good success rate still. Producing something of quality was obviously still valuable. Cumulative Advantage does not endorse people to write nonsense.

After reading the article myself, I'm not sure if it says anything that someone who observes the world didn't already know. Cumulative Advantage is a process that most people see every day. The article points out some good examples in Music, Books and Television, but it also happens on the Web, with wealth and even within social circles. Just because someone has given the phenomenon a name and studied it with respect to popular culture does not mean that its something incredibly earth shattering and new.

Cumulative Advantage has not quite stirred anything new with this blog yet, but I think that even if I suddenly was Dugg 100 times it would not make that much of a difference, here's why:

I like to track how many readers I'm getting daily and weekly. Since I've been writing for a, relatively, short time compared to many established "Web Authors" I want to know if my hits are growing. Slowly, but surely they are, blogs can grow organically as can music movements. Think underground bands which have hit it big after playing together for a while in their hometown, instead of American Idol created stars. Cumulative Advantage is not the only way to grow in popularity.

I am sure that having a post rated high on Digg, much like hitting #1 on the Pop Radio Charts or being the highest rated show on television, would definitely create a temporary explosion of growth. Yet, the fleeting nature of the hits would be frustrating. That's the interesting thing about Cumulative Advantage, because it appears randomly what's to say that it will not disappear just as quickly? Certain cultural phenomenons last for a long time, especially if they are good products, ex. Harry Potter. Others fade away quickly, ex. One Hit Wonders. Marketers struggle to figure out why one succeeded and the other failed, but the answer is probably just pure, random, human taste.

Cumulative Advantage is nice, who wouldn't want to have 200 or 1,000 or 5,000 hits on their blog in a day, but the lasting effect of a well built community is much stronger. Until next time, have a great life.