The Calimero Effect

Seth Finkelstein, who's done some intrinsic research on filtering (or censorware as he calls it) often seems to suffer from the Calimero effect, squealing into the blogosphere: It's unfair, they are big and I am small. That is, the big A-list blogs dwell in the warmth of attention, while the small B-list blogs may hope in vain for an occasional hit of somebody else than a relative or friend. He's right to squeal, of course, though maybe he does it a bit too much. Some smaller Calimero's would do anything to get his flow.

On his blog Finkelstein posts on an article by Daniel Kreis that analyzes an article by A lister David Weiner on comment-spam on blogs. There are some musings on the CBS memo controversy in the U.S., but a large part of Kreis' article is about the Calimero Effect:

"The second problem I have with Winer's comments is something that I have long encountered in the blogosphere: the idea that everybody can participate equally. Perhaps Winer, who no doubt has enjoyed the fruits of heavy traffic to his "publication" for years, cannot relate to what the less visible among us actually experience when we blog. Our words tend to slip into an ether of random google searches and stay confined to a loyal readership among family and friends."

Since I excluded my own IP address from the statistics counter, I can't fool myself any longer: I'm not even a Calimero, I'm still in the egg.

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More Calimero!