Power Law Distributions in Real and Virtual Worlds

The above link is an article that compares the pattern of size of global domains to the geographical distribution of the global population. One of the interesting points made in this article is that web pages are often closely linked to the economic and technological growth of countries. This is not surprising since more technologically advanced nations will inevitably spawn a greater amount of internet content.

Recently, it has been predicted that, despite its apparent arbitrariness, the sizes of Web sites and hyperlinks between them follow known distributions of growth phenomena such as those observed for cities and regions

Thus, the assumption here is that as certain regions become more developed and known to the outside world, they begin to show a greater presence on the internet. In other words, countries that acquire more power in the information world, also gain greater representation in the virtual one. Rank-size was used to determine the size of the web pages and it turned out that most of them followed power law distributions. As the results demonstrated, many of these web pages were fairly accurate estimates of the real world.

In general, as Web sites clearly form an integral part of social and economic development, their sizes and contents are likely to reflect the distribution of population and the urban geography of the real world

Thus, the information gained from their distribution can be used to construct an estimate of various aspects of a country. For example, many websites that have endings specific to their countries can be used to predict a large number of factors, such as GDP, income, population, and many other economic factors. However, for huge international domain names (very often ones ending in .com) this information can be slightly misleading because it might represent global company’s that outgrew any specific country and can be viewed almost as separate entities. This type of data should be taken into account, but it does not have a significant effect on the overall outcome.

The authors raise some interesting questions regarding the spread of content on the internet and how it can be used to map out the real world.