Micah also suggested the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell as a useful source of ideas. Have to look this up: "[...] a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does."

The power law distributions have connections to the concept of self-organized criticality, where Per Bak was one of the central investigators. I studied this area a bit in my master's thesis on cellular automata. One problem in power laws is that the distributions are difficult to verify. Sometimes the data gathering method affects the results. A phenomenon shows a power law distribution in the hands of one researcher, and lacks that kind of distribution in the hands of another researcher.

In any case, weblogs are an interesting area for both research and development. There is a lot of potential in weblogs. I hope this technology will offer a new kind of collaborative media for ordinary citicens, for knowledge workers, and for decision-makers. We have to see if these different communities can coexist in the same medium.