Kevin Marks

Kevin Marks is author of the weblog Epeus Epigone and a software engineer. He became principal engineer for Technorati after doing award-winning work for both Apple Computer and the BBC. He is a founding member of the Social Software Alliance.

At the first BloggerCon, Marks discussed the power curve as it applies to weblogs, probably the first coherent explanation of the topic most listeners had heard:

"The net changes the power law of the media curve. If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power curve that goes all the way down gradually, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single click. If you look at popularity in the "real" world--best-selling books, or top music--the power curve drops like a stone from a very high level. That's because in order to get a book published, or a piece of music recorded, you have to convince somebody that you're going to sell a million copies. You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being the number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten."

In 2003, Marks was an early experimenter with and contributor to the technologies that became popular under the names podcasting and iPodder in 2004.

At the October 4, 2003, Bloggercon, Marks demonstrated [1] a program that downloaded RSS-enclosure audio files and transferred them to Apple's iTunes music player, which could then synchronize them onto an iPod. In his weblog post from the conference that day, Marks mentioned discussing the program with Adam Curry, who also blogged about their chat the next day, including the possibility of their working together, a collaboration that apparently never went far.