"If you're obsessed with power law distributions in social systems (and hey, who isn't?), Jakob Nielsen's 1997 paper on positive returns to scale in web site traffic is still a good read. It's a bracing antidote to the namby-pamby egalitarianism you often find in conversations about weblogs, postulating that massive inequalites between the top 1% of sites (weblogs, bands, ...) and everyone else is the normal shape of popularity, even in systems without an RIAA."