Trying to quantify the breadth and depth of the blogosphere seems to me a little bit like trying to count the stars in a clear night sky in Montana. But The New Politics Institute, a liberal think tank
NPI has just released a report titled: "Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere" A New Force in American Politics."
Report The good news for the left, according to the report, is that the poliitcal dynamic of the blogosphere is tilting its way. Two years ago, the report stated, "the conservative blogosphere was between two and three times as large as the progressive blogosphere," But in the past two years, the 98 most trafficked liberal blogs had more than 15 million page views per week compared to less than 10 million for the top 150 conservative blogs. "In less than two years, the progressive blogosphere has grown from less than as big as the conservative blogsophere, to nearly double its size," the report crows.
Still, a few pargraphs later, it acknowledged that while the left enjoys an edge of 24 to 16 among the 40 most trafficked blogs, the right dominates the next 210 by a margin of 133 to 77, meaning that "it could be argued that conservatives are taking a decisive lead in the sort of targeted blogging that will provide them with real tangible benefits in the 2005-2006 elections and beyond."
That, of course, was the news seized on by the conservative Washington Times, which did a story on the NPI survey with the very selective headline: "Liberals lag conservaties in political blog presence."
I guess somebody's gotta try and empirically track the politics on the blogosphere, but here's hoping the new medium doesn't become so overtly politicized that it's just more partisan cannon fodder for our crude and cacophonous political discourse. But that's probably too much to ask.