Each power law is characterized by a unique exponent, telling us, for example, how many very popular Websites are out there compared to the less popular ones. As in Networks, Power Law describes the degree distribution; the exponent is often called the degree exponent.
I found the analogy between a road map and a map of airline flight routes quite interesting in relation to the nodes and connections between them. There is an unevenness between them, as the road map is a uniform network with similar nodes and links. The airline route, however, had direct flights from airports. Each node had a few links between them. This unevenness characterizes networks with power-law degree distribution.
Power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks, the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes co-exist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links.
The analogy really helped me understand what the reading was talking about in relation to power laws, as I got lost a lot in the sciency ascpect of it.