We're Very Important, Don't You Know

The blogosphere is perhaps the most numerous and expansive forum in the history of civilization. For the first time ever, people from across the world can share ideas and opinions, regardless of the actual distance between them. But who are these bloggers? What are their reasons for blogging? Each blogger seems to have a unique motive. Some bloggers have learned to band together. When a group forms within the blogging community, it becomes a sort of mini-blogosphere. This is especially true for political blogs, which played a huge part in the 2004 presidential election. By promoting a specific candidate and offering opinions, the blogosphere managed to stir the electorate and raise campaign funds in entirely new ways. Of course, it would be pretty simplistic to claim that the whole blogosphere centered around one candidate or one party. The truth is that the political part of the global blogosphere is itself divided. Much like the physical world, there is a liberal blogosphere and a conservative blogosphere. It’s the classic right versus left battle; only this time it’s ethereal.

The conservative blogosphere is larger numerically, but smaller in traffic. What that means is, while there are more conservative blogs than liberal blogs, the total number of people who visit them are lower than the number of people who visit their liberal counterparts. The reasons for the numerical superiority and lower traffic of the conservative blogosphere are one and the same: no feedback. Very few of the top conservative blogs allow visitors to leave comments or interact with the blogs’ creators in any way. They act, not as independent entities, but rather as a component of the overall conservative media system. This forces outspoken conservatives to create blogs of their own, but since they have no way to reach a larger audience (due once again to the lack of comments), we end up with hundreds of extremely small conservative blogs. Despite their lower traffic the conservative blogosphere can lay claim to several successes, the most notable being its exposure of falsified documents regarding special treatment President Bush received during his time in the National Guard.

The liberal blogosphere, on the other hand, encourages a more community-oriented atmosphere. Other than allowing visitors to post comments, several liberal blogs allow registered users to create articles and diaries of their own. This leads to some people with interesting opinions being “discovered”, and allows them to create a gathering of viewers for when/if they create a blog of their own. The liberal blogosphere has had its share of successes. A few months ago, a handful of Republican senators refused to cosponsor a bill formally outlawing the act of lynching. This led to a huge outcry in the liberal blogosphere, which shamed those senators and gained the blogosphere some notoriety once again.

While the blogosphere itself is huge, with literally millions of blogs, the political blogosphere consists basically of two huge clumps. These political blogs have picked up steam over the last few years. Already, blogs are integral to grassroots fundraising for many candidates, and will no doubt continue to play a major part in American politics for years to come.