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A good read.
"Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web"
http://www.princeton.edu/~mhindman/googlearchy--hindman.pdf
"ABSTRACT:
Claims about the Web and politics have commonly confounded two different
things:
retrievability and visibility, the large universe of pages that could
theoretically be accessed
versus those that citizens are most likely to encounter. While the governing
assumption of much previous work has been that retrievability would
translate inexorably
into visibility, we cast doubt on that claim. Drawing on a large literature
in computer science that ties a site's visibility to the number of inbound
hyperlinks
it receives, this paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the link
structure
surrounding political Web sites. Our technique involves iterative, extremely
large scale
crawls away from political sites easily accessible through popular online
search
tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site
content. In every
community we examine, we find that a small handful of Web sites dominate.
Online
political communities on the Web thus seem to function as "winners take all"
networks,
a fact that would seem to have widespread implications for politics in the
digital age."
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