They Have a Theory. Which is Theirs.

The covert operations wing of the Northern Alliance, our colleagues at Spitbull, have been prowling the left wing of the blogosphere, and they've found something; some lefty blogs have a theory why the best right-wing blogs are getting so much traction (relatively) in the mainstream media:

The left side of the blogosphere has watched with consternation the swift ascent (from comment to blog to major media story in the time it takes to commute to work) of the forgery charge that spawned RatherGate. And now, they've come up with a theory to explain it:

[T]he lower stickiness of top right-wing blogs compared to top left-wing blogs leads to greater message consistency in their half of the political blogosphere than in ours. ... This consistency helps stories from the right-wing blogosphere reach the national media more often than those from the left-wing blogosphere

"Stickiness" is the number of "Toys" found on a blog - comments, trackbacks, polls, links to other blogs, games and so on.

Might there be something to it? Compare and contrast Kos and Powerline. Kos is a veritable arcade of flashing lights and shiny toys; polls, open threads, comments, comments on comments. The big lefty blogs - Kos, Atrios and so on - often feel more like social clubs than news souces.

Nothing social about Powerline. Just the facts, maam.

Still, says Eloise, the theory dodgest the point:

Nope, the sheer lusciousness of the story had nothing to do with it. It's not every day we get to see a pompous media figurehead come face to face with the inconvenient fact he ignored to make his pretty story--although maybe it'll happen more often now that the blogosphere has started flexing its muscles. Nor did the story's apparent truth affect its meteoric rise. It was the non-stickiness of the right-wing blogs, dammit!

She's onto something.

Posted by Mitch at September 18, 2004 09:12 AM | TrackBack