Dive Into mark has an interesting discussion of the development of Power Laws as a follow up to a posting from Clay Shirky.

I tried to post a comment there but apparently he has closed it down. Oh well. Here goes anyway.

I tend to agree with Shirky, partly because I read the same books as he does and probably had them recommended via some other track by someone whose "first off the rank" status we both depend on.

What he says is true and trivial. All it does is confirm that the Blogosphere operates by what are now fairly well understood rules for how networks get lumpy. I'm waiting for the clever person who decides that the same rules were the reason the universe got lumpy after the big bang and are therefore the reason we are here. There's probably something about it in Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

What matters is not who gets famous but how it happens and what we can depend on in that process. If nothing else it gives us all a little hope, and in the meantime is helping to build a knowledge base and a structure and process for accessing that which is growing more widespread and isotropic by the day.

The real point about Blogs is the new tools such as aggregators, scrapers, bookmarklets etc that are being developed and the small communities of understanding that exist underneath the radar in specialist areas of knowledge; where exactly the same power laws apply but where the scale is short a whole bunch of zeroes.