The Power of the Tail

Hugh Hewitt offers up an interesting hypothesis here on the importance of small bloggers.

Technorati founder David Sifry explained the importance of this to me at the Democratic Convention in Boston, calling it the "power of the tail." Sure, a few hundred blogs seem to own a large share of the traffic, as N.Z.Bear's rankings by traffic shows. But there are tens of thousands of blogs each racking up unique visitors. If those blogs in the tail pick up a meme --say, "Dan Rather is a doddering fool and CBS is covering up for him"-- its spread across the universe of people using the web for information gathering is huge and almost instantaneous. And irreversible because a friend or colleague of Rick is much more likely to believe his analysis because he knows and trusts Rick than it is some knucklehead from CBS who is attempting to dismiss Rick as a pajama-wearing loon.

i wonder if he is right. Speaking only as a sample of one, i know that most of my friends and family don't even know that i blog. They get my opinions the old-fashioned way-- i inflict them on them over the phone or in-person.

This is a question i'd really like to see my fellow small bloggers weigh in on.