Metcalfe's Law is Wrong

IEEE Spectrum: Metcalfe's Law is Wrong gives in-depth analysis to one of those laws that people accepted uncritically.

I don't know what analysis Metcalfe's original "law" was based upon, but it doesn't seem as robust as Moore's law. The paper referenced here goes on to hypothesize what the law regarding the value of networks should have been. It dovetails nicely with another concept, the "long tail", that comes up when discussing e-commerce, blogs, and many other phenomena.