Latest issue of Media Magazine is out (though I haven’t actually seen the physical version). I’ve got an article in there about power laws titled “Power to (a Few) People”. Here’s the first few paragraphs:

From Facebook to Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign, social networks play a key role in media today. But, despite the current hype, networks aren’t particularly new. Consider, the famous “six degrees of separation” experiment examining social networks was conducted in the 1960s.

What’s new is our understanding of how they really function. Just 20 years ago, if you asked a social scientist to graph out a social network they would have shown you a bell curve: Most people are friends with a few people who know hardly anyone; a few who know a massive amount of people; and the majority sit in the middle. Bell curves, or Gaussian distributions, traditionally result when the subjects being plotted aren’t connected to one another.

The rest is over at the MediaPost site.