Blog Navel Gazing

As I have previously confessed, I like reading blogs. You can also guess that my preferred political blog reading is slanted leftward. Okay, it's firmly entrenched on the left, not just slanted. To me, one of the interesting thing about blogs is that they are so incredibly self-referential. If you read one, that person will cite things they read in another blog, and that other blog will often cite things in the first one. It stands to reason, in my experience. Reading blogs is a lot like having a conversation, mostly a one-way conversation. You don't want to have a conversation with people on a subject that will just inflame you, who needs the pain -- after all, the dysfunctional family is founded on such a principle. By the same token, I've found some real people who can still in this day and age talk about politics without entering into a hatefest. Those guys just don't seem to exist in interesting blogs, or if they do, they tend to be right/left wingers who are entertaining to read simply because they are good at trying to represent a more (pun intended) fair and balanced view. Then, in your little righty/lefty world, you can read the blog and feel better about yourself because you have the illusion that you are getting both sides. (Hmm, wait a minute, isn't this the basic premise behind Faux News. But, I digress, which, frankly is hard to do in this rambling post). When you find someone you like to read, though, and you can see from the blogs they link to who they like to read, you often find that you like to read those things as well.

All this was just a lead-in to say that we are starting to get some academic research into the situation. Of course, I read about this on one of those liberal blogs! As with a lot of research, it confirms some of the commonsense things I already talked about above. Still, some of it is interesting, when it comes to just how self-referential lefty blogs are compared to righty ones:

In our study we witnessed a divided blogosphere: liberals and conservatives linking primarily within their separate communities, with far fewer cross-links exchanged between them. This division ex-tended into their discussions, with liberal and conservative blogs focusing on different news articles, topics, and political figures. An interesting pattern that emerged was that conservative bloggers
were more likely to link to other blogs: primarily other conservative blogs, but also some liberal ones. But while the conservative blogosphere was more densely linked, we did not detect a greater uniformity in the news and topics discussed by conservatives.

... and...

Democrats are the ones more often cited by right-leaning bloggers, while Republicans are more often mentioned by left-leaning bloggers. [...] These statistics indicate that our A-list political bloggers, like mainstream journalists (and like most of us) support their positions by criticizing those of the political figures they dislike. An interesting topic for further study would be to compare how balanced bloggers’ presentation of the facts are compared with that of mainstream media journalists.

One day it will mean something to one of those Yale, Harvard, or Princeton profs. Hmm, or maybe the Princeton guy already wrote the book on it.