Jason Kottke has another post up about Power Laws. Interesting read. To summarize, links in blogaria graph as a power law curve. The power law is basically the 80/20 rule in disguise ("80% of the wealth is controlled by 20% of the population").
I don't really know what to say about this. It seems, lately, that people are concerned over how little blogs will get traffic. Everyone only has so much time to spend online, so people can only read so many sites a day, and if five top sites get the most links then they'll be the most read and no one else will be able to break onto the A-list. I completely disagree. With tools like weblogs.com, google, and dmoz it's becoming easier and easier to discover blogs that you like. To me, this seems like common sense: more blogs equals more recognition for the "medium", google likes fresh content, which most blogs have, more blogs become mixed in with google results, more people look for blogs in their google results, and more blogs get found/read. I'll admit, when a good blog search engine is written to take advantage of the realtime nature of blogs (current indexes, links to specific posts, categorizing, etc) this whole thing will become easier, but for now, it seems to be working. Since I've started, my traffic has slowly increased, and not because I beg for people to link to me. Instead, it's because occasionally people find things here that interest them and they come back for more. If you truly have something to offer people, whether it's witty insight, color commentary, or information they can't get anywhere else, they will find you and they will come back. It's as simple as that.
Maybe the graphing of weblog links says something more basic about people: in general, 80% of us are boring and have nothing interesting to say. In that case, it's no wonder the same twenty people who are friends and family read our blogs. Guess we'll just have to suck it up, eh?
For me, that's what it all boils down to. If your blog/website/journal/photo diary/etc is good enough, people will find it, and they'll tell their friends, and share the link, and you'll become popular and get lots of traffic. If you're average, though, your traffic will be average. I don't draw because I'm not good at it, despite the abundance of paper and pencils in my house. If you suck, find a new hobby.
At another level, though, it really comes down to your own expectations as well. I'm quite happy with the traffic I get here at BTB, but I'm sure there are other small-timers who think they deserve much more. Maybe they do, and if that's the case, it'll come with time. Stick with it. However, there's also a good chance that you're not any good and no one wants to tell you. I think many residents of blogaria fall into this category.
The barriers to entry for creating a blog are pretty low. This means the quality of blogs will vary greatly. Maybe instead of crying about how the a-list gets all the traffic, we should spend more time writing and sharing things that actually mean something. Show me why you deserve more traffic, don't tell me. Otherwise, enjoy your average traffic: it could be worse.