John’s Law is a scientific law — a hypothesis about the way the world works.

It has a comfortably mathematical looking formulation:

G = 1 / R²

Let’s break it down. G is the global importance of a given issue to consumers, the general public, the world at large.

R is the number of real estate bloggers writing about it during a given week.

Stated in words, the overall importance of an issue is inversely proportional to the square of the number of real estate bloggers talking about it in a given week.

Some hubbub over ePerks has gotten everyone up in arms this week. I estimate that there are 20 real estate bloggers talking about it, at least. So I judge the importance of this issue to be 1 / 20 squared, or .0025. We probably had a hundred bloggers talking about Greg Swann bagging on some guy’s video, so the importance of that issue was about .0001.

Counting the actual bloggers is left as an exercise to the reader.

To date I’m the only one writing about John’s law, so its importance is 1 / (1 squared), which of course is one.

I hope no one will write about this law except me.

I would hate to see it trivialized.