Long Tails All the Way Down: Rethinking A-Lists
In his recent post on mainstream newspapers’ gradual warming to Google as a source of traffic to their Websites, Jason points to Matthew Hindman’s claims that descriptions of the Net as ‘democratising’ media participation may be overstated (in Hindman’s book manuscript Voice, Equality, and the Internet), and notes my skeptical stance towards Hindman’s conclusions. Heh. Jason, are you baiting me? 
Seriously: yes, I do have very strong reservations about Hindman’s work. While he’s got access to some useful statistics about the distribution of attention in the blogosphere, and is perhaps worth reading for that reason, I’m very doubtful about what he does with those stats, and why he does it. To some extent, Hindman’s work seems to me to be cut from the same cloth as that of Andrew Keen (though operating at a more apparently scientific level) - which is to say that in the first place, he seems to grab many of the most banal and over-exuberant claims about the blogosphere and unsurprisingly has no trouble debunking them.
In reading his book manuscript, I noted down ’straw man argument’ a good half dozen times - he claims that his work helps to debunk views that the Internet in general and blogs in particular democratise media participation, but pays little attention to exactly what other authors mean when they express such views, and instead substitutes a caricature of their views instead.
To take one example: on page 71, Hindman writes:
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