"As I've said here before, I think Clay's work on power laws has been completely essential, but I also suspect that this kind of distribution is not inevitable, and that you can foster different models depending on how you design the software."
I think so, too. Well, to a certain extent. A power law is inevitable, but the software can influence the degree of drop off at the tail. We're actually thinking a lot about how to fatten the tail in the blogging world.