Blogosphere

Yesterday, Chris Bowers noted how the conservative blogosphere seems to have a disproportionately large influence on the mainstream media, as well as results in Google News.

For a long time, I have hoped that the progressive blogosphere would eventually emerge as an important cornerstone of a new progressive media empire that would not only serve as a counterweight to the Republican Noise Machine, but would even come to surpass the efforts of the right. To this end, I have written numerous posts, essays and articles lauding the growing influence of the progressive blogosphere, including the report The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere for NPI that I co-authored with Matt. However, after sepnding most of the day compiling research for another project I am working on, I stumbled across some rather disturbing data that indicates the progressive blogosphere is making few, if any, real waves when it comes to influencing the content of the MSM.His proposed solution:

There are probably at least 15-20 people who are trying to live as full-time progressive bloggers in America, and many more progressives with good blogs who would like to make blogging their full-time occupation. While these people are experiencing rapid audience growth, not only do many still have a difficult time making ends meet, but they are clearly struggling to make real waves within the national political discourse. (Hell, even I had to use Google News for this study instead of Lexis-Nexis, to which I should really purchase a subscription). To put this as bluntly as I can, progressives will not be able to break the conservative governing majority over the long term, no matter how narrow it may be, unless we can turn around the rapidly deteriorating media climate in this country. In order for progressives to change the deteriorating media climate in this country, it will be absolutely essential for the new progressive pundit class, which is to be found primarily in radio and the blogosphere, to be funded and cross-promoted.Now, while I find the call for developing progressive think tanks to be laudable -- and hardly unique -- I feel that Chris perhaps is missing something essential about the progressive movement and how it is complemented by the internet medium.

This is adapted from my response there....

It takes work to pay attention

Ann Coulter makes news, for example, by calling for the murder of journalists and other outrageous statements.

Is that influence? Perhaps she's marginalized herself, but there's no question that conservative voices, no matter how wacked, get access to the cameras and newspapers and skew the debate way right of the mainstream public. They provide simple, simplistic sound bites, playing right into the medium. (And the medium is the message, right?)

What's the message of the internet medium?

Here's something I've noted in my own stats: Links from the biggest sites above, with the exception of Atrios, seem to generate precious little traffic. Sites like Daily Kos are so insular, even a FP mention will generate only a few curiosity hits, while a casual oh-by-the-way link in a modestly trafficked site could generate hundreds of hits. (Now, before the army of consent descends upon me claiming I'm simply attacking Daily Kos, let me say categorically that I'm not. Sure, I have my issues with the site and some personalities there, but this is about the greater "progressive blogosphere" as a whole, which is orders of magnitude larger. Having the biggest blog on the internet is great for the vaguely Democratic/progressive/liberal causes, but it's not enough. The internet rewards internetworking, not just isolated size.)

This is not a new criticism: The big sites tend not to link to the smaller sites. The "Top 100" pay attention to each other, but the real strength of the progressive blogosphere is in the thousands upon thousands of very sharp smaller blogs out there. (Where would many sites be without Peter Daou constantly linking out to mid-sized sites?)

The internet rewards communities across websites. The internet rewards conversations between websites. The internet rewards relevance, which is measured by in-content links from other sites of relevance. This is the state of SEO today.

And blogrolls are mostly ignored by the search engines now -- certainly deprecated. The relevance comes from in-content linking. And there's precious little of that from the big blogs because everybody's looking one way, and the big bloggers don't see the smaller sites behind them.

With all the heated debates on the left-of-right perspectives of the major issues, it would seem that there's plenty of opportunity to link out -- to post a dissenting opionion, for example. But unfortunately there seems to be a mindset on the part of many big bloggers that dissenting opinions should be ignored rather than engaged, preferring to do their part to help a website drift off "in obscurity." If we cannot embrace the dissent within our vaguely-defined "ranks", then how can we expect more progressive influence? If we're so busy ignoring each other, then how can we expect others to pay attention?

Changing this paradigm may not affect how the MSM treats the blogosphere, but it WILL affect how Google News treats these hits. I have some email alerts for Google News, and in the results I'd say 2/3 are mainstream news sources and 1/3 are conservative sites (like "LifeNews"). Every now and then a liberal voice comes through, but that seems very rare in my experience. (Does Google News have a political bias?)

But here we are, some 7+ years (?) since the Cluetrain started, and we who are most advantaged by these trends collectively continue to fail to appreciate it, and act upon it.

Cross-linking helps. And that takes effort, work, time. But with money or not, people already are blogging the heck out of the topics of the day from a progressive perspective. The real question, perhaps, is not whether they should be paid by a thinktank, but rather why so many excellent voices languish in obscurity, ignored not just by Google News and the MSM but by their peers. Thoughts?

You start with a group of around a hundred or so men who only link to each other and throw a scrap here or there to a pool of about 500 women. The men get lots of links and lots of attention. They go on TV and get even more attention from people who don't normally frequent the blogosphere.

The 500+ women are all writing and linking to the small group guys (which helps them because there are so many women bloggers), and to each other, but because there are so many women bloggers, no one woman (except maybe some young, hot D.C. babe who looks good on TV and makes the producers seem all concerned with diversity) gets the kind of concentration of links that the men do.

The men get all impressed with themselves because they get attention and links and publicity, and sit around in a permanent circle jerk, praising and trying to impress each other, contemplating their navels and wondering why there are no women with as many links as they have.

The women then go berserk, but the men don't know that because they only read other men in their little barrel, but their cluelessness gets them LOTS of links because there are So Many Women Bloggers who want them to get a clue.

Of course, that's just a theory. Like Evolution. I could be wrong.

Today, Kos notes that some politically conservative bloggers have defended him in the Zephyr stink. Wondering why, he comes to the conclusion that many of us have been saying for months now:

Bloggers of all stripes are realizing that we, as a medium, are facing an attack from the media establishment -- from the newsrooms to the J-schools. They hoped we would go away after the election but we're still around causing all kinds of trouble, so they will use every hook to try and discredit the blogosphere.

As Jerome notes, we're at war with the Right, and the conservative bloggers see themselves at war with the Left. But I think we're seeing a measure of solidarity when our medium is under attack. And make no mistake about it, the media establishment is gunning for us.

(Steve Galliard's rant on the subject provides some background as well, and interesting thoughts on blogging ethics.)

--But it's not just the blogs. The media establishment is also going after independent voices in the news -- for example, in the form of rapidly escalating licensing fees. When people challenge what's "fit to print," these taste-makers who tell us what's appropriate to know don't like it when they aren't in the final position to judge.

[Edit: Clarified that last sentence, which had an ambiguous referent. Revised text is in italics.]

In case you missed the news, or any of several blog entries on the topic, "blog" has been named Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year!

This might be fine and dandy if it reflected buzz in old media newsrooms (as it probably does), but the world of the year is determined by online look-ups! That's right -- the net-surfing public is only this year discovering that blogs exist. Egad! (Allow me to take this moment to declare that my blogging experience goes way back to 2001 and that I've been doing the web page thing since, well, I don't want to date myself.)

The BBC notes that Oxford wasn't so slow on the uptake:

However, the word is already included in some printed versions of the Oxford English Dictionary.

A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use.

"I think it was the word of last year rather than this year," he said.

"Now we're getting words that derive from it such as 'blogosphere' and so on," he said.

Those hip Brits.

Feministe points out that "defenestration" made the list at number ten, and I, too, have loved that word since the '80s. (Oops - now I have dated myself.) But what about these other words? When I think of the last election, and consider that online Americans were looking up such obscure words as:

...I start to worry about the state of our republic.

(And what's with those lubbers who had to look up "hurricane"??? Don't they watch TV? Maybe not. We can hope.)

-media girl