[EGreg]

Benford's law makes a lot of sense if you consider that many of the numbers are derived from counting up from 0. The scale of these things is exponentially distributed, and therefore the leading digits are more likely to be 1 than 9. This is related to social media -- once your userbase gets big enough it starts growing or shrinking proportionally to its size, i.e. exponentially. This is also somewhat related to the value of a social network ... Metcalfe's law seems to be too optimistic. THe value is probably more like nlog n