19
Website and not the entire Web, but it is interesting how closely the 80 percent-20
percent figures fit our data.
The dimension of geography or nationhood (measured by country names)
was the dimension that conformed the least to the backward L-shaped
distribution. Attention in terms of Web pages was not concentrated on the top 10
percent of nations the way it was on the top 10 percent of encyclopedia topics,
years, or Fortune 1000 companies. Maybe ease of access to the Web is helping
many countries to attain more visibility around the world than they were ever
able to achieve before. Perhaps, as some have suggested, through the Internet we
are becoming a global village after all (McLuhan, 1964; Symes, 1995). But still,
certain countries are represented on the Web with many fewer pages than other
countries. The ones with the lowest Web presence are still probably among the
poorest countries in the world.
Possible explanations for the L-shaped distribution
. We can only
speculate on why information on the Web might take the form of a backward L-
shaped distribution.
Perhaps the situation is analogous to plant growth, which is another
situation in which the L-shaped distribution shows up (Silvertown and
Charlesworth, 2001; Cruzan, 1997). Once one plant gets to be a little bit larger
than others, its leaves block the sunlight from other plants. Its potential for
growth increases while that of its neighboring plants diminishes. In the case of
the Web, we can substitute human attention for sunlight. Maybe there is only a
Convention