Despite increasing Internet activism over recent years, blogs are...
Despite increasing Internet activism over recent years, blogs are still “viewed through the traditional lenses of politics or media, rather than as the communal social phenomenon that they are,” according to a new report from the New Politics Institute…
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(NPI). “Real political power and influence is now being wielded through online communities comprising millions of people. And trends suggest that this is only the beginning,” said the report, released Wed. The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere, by prominent bloggers Chris Bowers of MyDD and Matt Stoller of Blogging of the President, notes a burgeoning social structure that includes important differences in how conservatives and liberals use the Web to communicate. For years, conservatives dominated the political Internet, with websites like FreeRepublic.com, the Drudge Report and Newsmax. Moveon.org was one of the few exceptions to conservatives’ dominance, the authors state. “Their Internet supremacy was anchored in, and improved on, an already existing conservative infrastructure. On the whole, it reflected the top-down, coherent messaging structure that characterizes the conservative movement,” the report said. Since 2002, Howard Dean’s campaign and other events have helped the blogosphere thrive as a powerful political force, the authors said. An analysis by Bowers said liberals have an edge in overall traffic, but more conservative sites rank among the top 250 political blogs. Over the past 2 years, traffic on the top 1,000 political blogs has risen from 500,000 visitors a day to over 3 million. The visits are mostly to the most popular blogs, but 409 blogs have more than 1,000 visitors, vs. the 51 previously estimated, the report said. A recent study by Bowers showed that 54.6% of conservative traffic and 69% of liberal traffic went to the top 10 blogs representing their respective ideologies. “Unlike their conservative counterparts, progressive Internet activists have not relied on an existing set of institutional relationships. They have instead forged a new constituency group, a new set of leaders, and a new forest of social relationships,” the report said: “Bloggers do not reside at the political fringes, and defy easy characterization as ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative.’ They run the full gamut of ideologies, but are united by their shared commitment to active engagement in local, state and national politics.” Early responses to the report shared on NPI’s site were largely positive. One reader called the report “a major step forward in looking at the big picture.”