Daniel Drezner maintains one of the busiest blogs around, and also happens to be a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He and a colleague have put together their first draft of a scholarly paper, “The Power and Politics of Blogs”, to be presented this year at the American Political Science Association.
I downloaded and read it today. I think it tells some interesting tales about the relationship between traditional journalism and media and the blogosphere. One journalist commented to them in their survey:
“The editorial process of the blogs takes place between and among bloggers, in public, in real time, with fully annotated cross-links.”
I think that, along with rapidity of response, is the most significant aspect of blogs which separates them from traditional news coverage. In editorial offices, decisions are made about what to cover (and how intensely) based on many factors, only one of which is ideology. Bloggers post what they want to post. Editors can’t fact-check quickly, and must make quick decisions based on what a reporter already has. In the blogosphere, everyone is an editor. If you misstate fact, you are told, and quickly. An outright lie may have a million lives if it sounds credible enough and a blog’s readers are all of like mind, but there is usually someone around to throw cold hard fact into the mix.
And there are plenty of editors willing to take on the task.
The blogosphere has grown at an astronomical rate. In 1999 the number of blogs was estimated at under fifty; at the end of 2000, estimates ranged into the thousands. Less than three years later, such estimates range from 2.4 million to 4.1 million. One study estimates that by 2005, over ten million blogs will have been created.
I did a check at Technorati just to see what’s going on out there. They list slightly more than 3 million that they track. A search for this site showed 56 inbound links, which puts me somewhere below midpoint. I like being average.
Even though there are over a million bloggers, posting approximately 275,000 new items daily, the median blogger has almost no political influence as measured by traffic or hyperlinks. This is because the distribution of weblinks and traffic is heavily skewed, with a few bloggers commanding most of the attention.
The main thing blogs do for political discourse is bring a variety of minds together. I’ve always felt that nobody has all the answers in anything, but if we put our minds together, we probably have all the important answers. That is the strength of the blogosphere. Those dozen or so major bloggers help pull all the answers together, and that is where influence happens.
“You can’t blog your way into the White House, at least not yet, but blogs are America thinking out loud, talking to itself, and heaven help the candidate who isn’t listening.”
From Time magazine’s “Meet Joe Blog.”
Comment by AR — July 23, 2004 @ 9:50 am