With the catalogging out of the way, a few thoughts:

Power Law distributions in blogs and Websites are self-similar (big ones, little ones tend to the same N vs. 1/N distribution). My hits and referrers graphs look the same on slow days and on Slashdot days. Fractal patterns are self-similar: and fractals have some very interesting qualities, some of which appear to pop up in hits and referrer log patterns.

Power Law is among the most, if not the most common distribution of any resource in nature. Think about it for a moment: the Solar System has all its mass in the planets and Sun, and they acreted in a fashion that looks a lot like preferential selection (the NEC team called it 'rich get richer') - areas in primordial gas that had slightly higher density would have slightly more gravity and thus would grow over time at the expense of areas of lower density. It's interesting to think of a Weblog as having 'gravity'.

I've been able to think of a few linear or constant distributions - air in a room for example, but they always break down as you scale. Air around the planet looks like some approximation of a Power Law, with most of the air stuffed into the bottom few thousand feet of the atmosphere.

Anyway, I've been keeping these things on a dedicated blog: Weblog Metrics, that is in itself part of a linked set where I've been observing the real world dynamics of links and referrers. Hopefully, I'll find time to publish some of that stuff soon...
Comments 1:03:44 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures