Blog Wars

Every day, it seems, there are more blogs, more compilations of blogs and more chatter about blogs, as online debate comes in more flavors.

You have congressmen, presidential candidates and corporate leaders all doing the blog thing, as well as legions of ordinary folks armed mainly with opinions. This, in my view, is a great thing, even though no human being, including me, can keep up with the millions of words being posted each day. (Now you have to keep up not just with Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo but with his TPM Cafe, not to mention the 1,239 people posting at Huffington).

But the debate on the most popular political blogs often seems to reflect the old right-left warfare -- just search on "Downing Street Memo" if you doubt me -- in ways that too often seem utterly predictable. (This was sort of captured in my chat yesterday. A D.C. reader: "Once again we are left with the media using manufactured documents in a naked effort to drive President Bush from office." A Michigan reader: "I find the mainstream media's response to the memos' explosive content very amusing. It's as if British papers had discovered Watergate, covered the hell out of it, then the American papers sniffing months later that everybody knew about all that already.")

Now comes an exchange over whether the top conservative and liberal blogs are different in more than just ideology. To wit: Are liberals more likely than their counterparts on the right to gather in cyber-communities? If so, is that a real strength that helps galvanize folks? And are blogs on the left becoming a more powerful force, if not quite to the point that conservatives dominate talk radio?

Chris Bowers of the (liberal) MyDD kicks off the debate:

"Last September, I wrote an article entitled "Top Down Right-Wing Blogosphere Growing Powerful," that argued the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs was allowing them relatively greater message discipline than left wing blogs and a superior ability to influence the content of the national media.

"In January, I wrote a follow-up piece entitled "Partisan Democratic Blogs Growing Far More Influential Than 'Independent' Right-Wing Blogs," where I argued that progressive blogs, due to their affiliation with the Democratic Party, were growing influential in ways that the largely media focused right-wing blogosphere was not. In my latest irregular installment that compares the national liberal blogosphere to the national conservative blogosphere, I would like to discuss a new phenomenon I see emerging. The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins . . .

"Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Café, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter, BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls. By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four conservative blogs. None, zip, zero, nada. This is particularly stunning when one considers the importance of the Free Republic community to the conservative netroots. While it would appear that there are hordes of Glenn Reynolds wannabe's among conservatives in the netroots, Redstate.org sticks out as the only success story for a community oriented blog within the conservative blogosphere. In fact, of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one, Little Green Footballs, even allows comments, much less the ability to actually write a diary or a new article."

Patrick Ruffini a former Bush-Cheney campaign aide, sees a different dynamic:

"Conservative blogs may be smaller, but they are more densely interconnected. Conversation on conservative blogs is just as likely to happen between blogs as within them. In fact, I've noticed a unique phenomenon emerging right here: quite often, my number of trackbacks rivals, and sometimes exceeds, the number of comments. In terms of solid, valuable interaction, trackbacks are pure gold: they tell you that someone thought enough of your post not just to respond to it on a seldom-read comments page or diary, but to give it prime real estate in their personal space, all the while sending visitors your way.

"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 . . .

"We have quite a paradox here: liberal blogging is thoroughly centralized and highly stratified, with Kos at the very top of the pyramid. The conservative blogosphere is more cooperative and egalitarian, with plenty of Kumbaya-singing, beer-swilling, and link-swapping around the campfire. In the conservative blogopshere, it's leave no blog behind."