Update on Conservative Versus Liberal BlogsGot a little reaction
on this post that I'd like to elaborate on.
Both Paul and Lone Ranger commented that what we could be seeing is the effect of crossover readership; maybe conservatives read liberal blogs and liberals read conservative blogs. I'd suspect that argument has quite a bit of validity, although since I was looking at changes since the election, I don't know if it would really have a dramatic impact.
Scrapiron (who's a terrific commenter) smacked me upside the head for believing what I read on a left-wing blog. However, I didn't believe the left-winger at first; it was only after I looked at the numbers that I began to wonder if he had a point.
Coalition of the Chillin' member the
Strata-Sphere put up a solid post on this, noting that how you define "community" may have a lot to do with the differences between the right side and the left side of the blogosphere. The right side links quite frequently to other blogs on the right side, while the left is a little more apt to say, "Come post your 'diary' pages on our blog." It's the rugged individualists versus the communitarian hive.
The Strata-Sphere also links to the always-interesting
Patrick Ruffini, who has this to say:
Bowers disparages the proliferation of large numbers of mid-tier conservative blogs, but in what way is this unhealthy? In fact, most of the cooperative, traffic-sharing arrangements in the blogosphere have emerged on the right. These days, it's hard to keep track of all the various carnivals and link-fests, from the Cotillion to Carnival of the Capitalists to Classiness All Around Us to Conservative Grapevine. These link-fests are vital to mid-range blogs getting noticed, and probably in keeping with its more selfish, celebrity-seeking nature, such link-fests are much less prevalent in the left-blogosphere. Also, contrast the top liberal and "conservative" blogs. Glenn Reynolds is much more generous in linking to other blogs than Markos.I don't think there's any denying that observation; in fact there was
a study a number of months ago that found that conservative bloggers are much more interlinked than liberal blogs. This was what I was getting at with these observations:
Second, it certainly looks to me like Kos is absorbing the left-wing of the blogosphere. It's ironic that the poster at MyDD was making a big thing about them catching the righties because of their sense of community, when his community was suffering the biggest drop in traffic since the election of any of the blogs. It's quite possible that Kos' big jump since New Year's has come at the expense of many other liberal blogs.
Third, Instapundit may be losing his traffic to smaller right-wing bloggers. Certainly I suspect a lot more people go to Power Line and CQ directly these days rather than waiting to see the link from Glenn.
