Web 2.0 and Beyond

The Network Effect and Web Topology    ◾     79  

this had profound implications, not only for the Web 2.0 services that were to emerge later,

but also as a way to analyse and measure human society.

7.2.1 Power Laws

As the number of websites and pages began to explode in the 1990s there was an unspo-

ken assumption that the way webpages were linked together via hypertext would follow a

Gaussian distribution

*

(or ‘bell curve’), implying that most documents would be roughly

equally linked to and therefore in a sense equally popular (see Figure7.4). e reason this

was expected was because it was assumed that the Web would pretty much resemble some ...