The Finch Formerly Known As Gold

24 August 2007

A balance of wonks

The proprietors of Wonkosphere have indexed about a thousand blogs so far, and three-fifths of them, including this one, are listed as "conservative." This seems a trifle high to me, and here they try to explain:

  1. It’s true. There ARE more conservative than liberal bloggers.

  2. The conservative Wonkosphere is more tightly connected than the liberal Wonkosphere, so it showed up more prominently in our spidering.

  3. Conservative bloggers are talking about the presidential candidates more than liberal bloggers. The directory generally only includes conservative or liberal blogs that actually discuss the 2008 race; there are many liberal blogs that are issue-focused rather than candidate-focused.

Of these, the third is probably closest to the mark: it took me all of three seconds to find a local blog on the left that deals with issues more than with candidates.

And if you're just estimating buzz, as Wonkosphere seeks to do, a nasty comment about Hillary Clinton on a right-wing blog counts exactly the same as a favorable comment on a left-wing blog — which perhaps explains why Senator Clinton is way ahead in their buzz standings. (And this post should only add to her lead.)

Still: Patrick Ruffini among the liberals? I think they're paying too much attention to his tag cloud.

Posted at 7:32 PM to Blogorrhea , Political Science Fiction


Thanks for highlighting the site. Agree, with your comment. For example, very few posters on Daily Kos discuss candidates, mostly Bush bashing.

Thanks for heads-up on Ruffini. Doh! But--gotta love the power of the web to catch your mistakes.

Posted by: Wonker at 8:30 PM on 24 August 2007

I am not convinced that Wonkosphere's stats accurately reflect the entirety of blogdom. I am also not convinced that, right out of the gate, it is "the best poliical web site ever". Though that may have been tongue in cheek.

Posted by: Mister Snitch! at 9:05 PM on 24 August 2007

Someday I'll be big enough to get wonked...

Posted by: Tam at 9:33 AM on 26 August 2007

What perplexes me is that I was, given the fact that I have Technorati cred no better than yours and maybe half your traffic.

Posted by: CGHill at 9:51 AM on 26 August 2007

I got indexed simply by submitting my URL.

Unless I missed myself while initially browsing through the index. I've gotten so used to being overlooked that I've started doing it myself just to fit in.

Posted by: McGehee at 3:04 PM on 26 August 2007

Hi all,
1. Yes, we do tongue-in-cheek at Wonkosphere.
2. We want to be as complete as possible, so if we missed you, please add your blog via
http://wonkosphere.com/bloginquiry.htm
3. Why did some get in and some not in our initial directory? We used an automated process using a "snowball" sample of blogrolls. So, nothing personal. Hopefully a month from now we'll have twice as many blogs being tracked as we do now, if you can help us.

Posted by: Wonker at 3:04 PM on 28 August 2007