Steve Rubel’s explaining memetrackers* to the marketers. “Look, but don’t touch,” says he. Darn good advice, but not possible in quantum mechanics, where observing any event inherently changes it.
Now, picture Web 2.0 as a Schrödinger’s cat, with more people peeking and poking at her every day. Is she starting to look rather different from what we expected?
Sticking to memetrackers, since that’s what Steve wrote about:
There’s now a huge difference between linking to the last story at the bottom of the page on Memetracker X and linking to the only-slightly-less-popular story that almost but never-quite made it onto that page. This creates a huge incentive for ambitious bloggers to try to link to stories they think will be popular link-targets instead of linking to stories that tickle their interest.
The linkage pattern of profit-seeking bloggers is changed because it’s observed–pulled toward what Kevin Marks called the zero-sum game of traditional media, instead of the what GapingVoid calls the “nice long tail.”
A lot of Web 2.0 Schrödinger’s cats need to worry a bit more about those nice long tails.
* Steve mentions Memeorandum, Tailrank, and Digg. I also love their grand-daddy, Cameron Marlow’s Blogdex.