Nice piece from Oblomovka about how the Net's changed the distribution of fame.
My take: Basically, if we say that fame follows a power-law distribution, the Net's created decreased the exponent, flattening the area under the curve; but it's also raised and fattened the area under the curve. More people are more famous, and the average amount of fame/person has risen dramatically. This is why so many theoretial economies are becoming actually possible - search economies, distribution economies, etc, etc.
I think an interesting thing to consider is the time dimension of fame (Sorry Dr G). The Net has had a more dramatic impact, IMHO, on the dynamics of fame - as we can see in the world of political blogs, etc. This is because cutting search and transaction costs makes it possible to gain fame much faster than before - but the flipside is that the churn rate of fame is also much higher, since fame is also easier to lose.
That is too much nerd factor for one post.