One thing that stands out to me is the discussion of fitness in "The Eighth Link". A lot of blogging that I've seen is referring to winner take all and the power law distribution. But the idea of fitness means that sufficiently fit newcomers do have a chance to become network hubs.

For me, the emergence of the blogosphere has rendered the mainstream computer press (which is all on-line -- the print stuff became useless a long time ago - journals of the ACM, IEEE, and Usenix notwithstanding) almost useless. The blog content is much more technical and full of insight. It also contains a lot more "offbeat" content, which is important to me as a source of new ideas or serendipitous combinations of ideas. I bet that many of the blogs that are dearest to me are not in the Technorati 100. And that is just fine by me, because at least those guys are out there, and those of us in the "tail" can have our conversations, help each other learn, and give each other a whack on the side of the head.

We already have sub networks within the blogsphere, dedicated to topic areas, Java blogs, .Net blogs, etc. It'd be interesting to look at the blogosphere as networks composed of networks. The whole thing certainly behaves according to a power law, but are the little networks that have their own power laws going on inside?