I was slow to read my issue of Media Magazine this month, and only just now got to read Noah’s piece on power laws and their utility for better understanding social networks. This is good stuff. You should read the whole thing, but until you get around to doing that, here are 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.

But when scientists actually looked at how links were distributed on the Web, they didn’t get a bell curve at all…

“The New Next — Power to (a Few) People” in Media Magazine by Noah Brier