Browsing the directory of Wonkosphere, we find this morning that there are more conservative blogs listed than liberal blogs (608 conservative, 373 liberal, and 24 independent).  Hmm…  So what does this mean?

First, let me briefly describe how we classified blogs (see also the FAQ). We took an equal number of “known” conservative and liberal blogs and used their blog rolls to start spidering the Wonkosphere. We used a purely computational approach to analyze this network and identified two giant clusters (conservative, liberal), and then we “manually” vetted each site and changed afiliation as needed. While there are opportunities for errors in either step, they would be small in number compared to the gap we observe.

So why are there more conservative than liberal bloggers in the directory?

1. It’s true.  There ARE more conservative than liberal bloggers.

2. The conservative Wonkosphere is more tightly connected than the liberal Wonkosphere, so it showed up more prominently in our spidering.

3. Conservative bloggers are talking about the presidential candidates more than liberal bloggers. The directory generally only includes conservative or liberal blogs that actually discuss the 2008 race; there are many liberal blogs that are issue-focused rather than candidate-focused.

I think all of these might be true, but I think #3 is the critical one.  Counting up web sites of a certain type however is kinda Web 1.0.   A blogging community of ten people can have a hundred times the activity level and impact of a hundred.  What really matters is what the particular blogging community is collectively saying, and how active they are, and that’s what buzz share is capturing. 

For the past week, it hasn’t mattered if the blog was conservative or liberal or any other color under the sun, people were focused on Hillary. 

On a final note, not all political blogs can be put into one box or another. Views vary in nuance, and this can lead to errors in judging their ideological bent… And, there are probably a few blogs that we just screwed up on.   So if we have made a mistake please tell us about it here, so we can get our directory up to six sigma quality!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 6:35 am and is filed under Politics 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.