shouting loudly

Okay, I need to double-dip on this issue of the conservative twitter-revolution.  But first, let me give some of the topline results from my upcoming MPSA paper, on the political blogosphere in the 2008 election.

The paper analyzes a new dataset that I’ve developed over the past year, the Blogosphere Authority Index.  Everything I’ve published so far has been BAI-related, though I’m trying hard not to get typecast as “the blog ranking guy” in political science circles.  Basically, it combines a measure of network centrality (using mentions in site blogrolls to identify clumps/neighborhoods of networked blogging sites) with measures of site traffic (through Sitemeter and Alexa), hyperlinks (through Technorati), and comment volume (directly recorded.  All of this is publicly-available data, but no one besides me aggregates it in one place.  Since each of these measures is associated with a different type of blog influence (is a well-hyperlinked blog more influential than one with tons of visitors?  I’d rather sidestep that philosophical debate and just track both!), I convert all four measures into ordinal rankings, then merge the rankings into a “top 25″ composite for the progressive and conservative blogospheres.  This was presented in an IPDI piece last year, and I used the rankings for my “Understanding Blogspace” blog-topology article in JITP.

Anyway, after constructing the rankings by hand in November ‘07, my father (who is a computer programmer) took one look and said “we could automate that.”  So starting in August ‘08, we have monthly BAI updates, and from September 21-December 14, we took weekly readings to get a better picture of how the increase in political blog traffic affected the rankings.  The MPSA paper is my first-cut analysis of the data, answering four research questions:

1. Is there an equal influx of attention during the election cycle?  Do the rankings remain stable with the flood of attention.

2. Do conservative community blogs rise in prominence over this cycle?  I’ve previously argued that the community blog structure is a preferable format for organizing, and noted that progressives have a wide lead in this category.  The heightened activity of the election should be an opportunity for conservative community blogs to gain traction and build “membership.”

3. When the two top 25 lists are merged into a “top 50″ combined list, does the progressive edge found in the November ‘07 research remain unchanged, increase, or decrease?  Put another way, which side gains a proportionally larger share of traffic?

Question 1 is still getting coded.  2 and 3 are done though, and they blow me away.  Redstate.org, which was ranked 9th among conservative blogs a year and a half ago, fell to 19th during the course of the election cycle.  Newsbusters, which has some community features but no diary structure, moved from 6th to 3rd in their rankings, but besides that it appears as the conservative community blogs actually took a huge step backward during this election cycle.  Meanwhile, newcomer site TheNextRight.com continually fails to make the top 25 because, despite a number of positive mentions in the mainstream media, the guys behind RebuildtheParty just can’t seem to build much site traffic or a large commenter community.

Regarding question 3, the average of all progressive blogs’ top 50 ranking in November ‘07 was 23.5, conservatives was 27.5.  What that means is that the 25 progressive blogs were skewed a bit towards the top half of the rankings and the 25 conservative blogs were skewed a bit towards the bottom.  Or in even more basic english, the leftosphere was systematically a few points better than the rightosphere.  That gap increased to an average progressive rank of 20.2/conservative rank of 30.4.  From a 4-point margin to a 10-point margin, or, well,’ HUGE.  As a whole, this suggests that the conservative blogosphere during the heightened attention of the ‘08 election was a pale shadow of the progressive netroots, and that the gap is in fact growing over time.

…This is where I return to my twitter-rant, because it occurs to me that I am likely to receive a question during MPSA from some on-the-ball political scientist about whether I’m being too limited in only looking at these blog communities.  “What about Twitter?  Aren’t conservatives leading on twitter?  Might they make up the infrastructure gap THAT way?”  And the answer will be a howling no.

Here’s the thing: basic blogs aren’t all that good for building online communities of interest.  Try using a blogger.com site to organize a campaign, I dare you.  The whole point of my “Understanding Blogspace” article is that blogs are a pretty basic piece of software, and the software can be deployed for a variety of purposes.  Your basic blog is a megaphone pointed into endless cyberspace.  It enhances your voice, but probably only to the people who were looking to find it.  A blog on CNN.com or sierraclub.org is a very different cup of tea — it’s designed to enhance the mission of the existing organization, and people visit it based on the repuation of that organization.  And community blogs, with their diary structures, serve as gathering spaces for online communities-of-interest.  The most successful of the bunch (DailyKos, MyDD, OpenLeft to name a few) act as quasi-interest groups.  And that’s where the political effectiveness comes from, these new forms of internet-mediated organization.  We should care that Redstate has fallen from 9th to 19th because no site higher on the conservative list allows a random visitor to move up a “ladder of engagement,” develop identity as a member of the community, and eventually take action [except townhall, but it appears to be falling in the rankings as well].  HotAir.com is simply not a good technical medium for building a movement.

And there’s my fundamental point about Twitter and politics.  Twitter is a “microblogging” format.  It’s kinda goofy and cool, and it’s definitely experiencing a bubble right now.  But you can’t track reputation on twitter.  You can’t gather a community-of-interest.  You can’t reward good behavior and sanction bad behavior, or engage in detailed discussion.  All the things that make an average blogspot blog a poor venue for building a movement are amplified on twitter, and all the things that make a community blog a good spot for it are removed.  Put simply, twitter isn’t going to win you any elections because the technology is terribly-suited to that particular goal.

That said, I won’t be able to do anything to pop twitter’s bubble, and if it leads to conservatives heading Don Quixote-like in the wrong technological, direction, that’s a good thing for my policy preferences.  But I’m telling y’all right now, one month in advance of MPSA: I’m going to find the inevitable Twitter question annoying as all hell.