Last week, President Obama sat on a conference call with a handful of progressive bloggers to urge them to remain vigilant and active in the current battle for health care reform.
“I know the blogs are best at debunking myths that can slip through a lot of the traditional media outlets,” he said. “And that is why you are going to play such an important role in our success in the weeks to come.”
If blogs are critical in the current battle for public opinon, then there may be real cause for concern: according to our sample of almost 2500 political sites and blogs, conservatives are winning hands down, with almost twice as many posts as the progressive side (4642 posts vs. 2785 in the past 15 days).
Health care reform has kept the conservative blogosphere extremely busy, accounting for 41.4% of content published in the conservative blogosphere over the past 2 weeks, with an average of 9 posts per conservative blog (vs. 6 on the progressive side).
Not sure yet whether the conference call gave a boost to progressive bloggers, but this is one campaign on the internet the President does not seem to be winning.
This story is worse than worthless because you don’t provide your methodology or data.
Given those and some indication the influence of the blogs one might be able to discuss whether your headline raises a coherent point.
One thing that seems to be left out of your data is blogs that appear at sites you classify as ‘info pros’ and would appear to be left out of the statistics. Very influential blogs appear at the NYTimes (Krugman), Washington Post (Klein), the Washington Monthly as a whole, Huffington Post, Talkingpoints Memo, The American Prospect, etc.
You completely leave out Salon.com.
And how to you treat a place like DailyKos.com which has thousands of members writing their own blogs. Do you count their up to 300 diaries per day (a very large portion of recent ones have to do with health care). Lets see, 15 days x 200 diaries = 3000 health blog posts.
To be fair, it’s easier for opponents of the bill, because the bill sucks.
” 2500 political sites and blogs, conservatives are winning hands down, with almost twice as many posts as the progressive side (4642 posts vs. 2785 in the past 15 days). ”
Huh? 2500 sites hvae a total of 7500 posts in two weeks? Each site averages 3 posts in two weeks, or 1 1/2 posts per week?
The blogs I read have several (dozen?) posts per HOUR.
Progressive vs conservative.
More accurately, liberal vs. realist
perhaps its based on the fact that republicans are such sore losers still to this day, and feel obligated to spew forth the dribble pounded into their gun toting, homophobic, self-entitled bigot minds by the likes of glenn beck, sean hannity, bill o’reilly, and rush limbaugh.
@MonkeyBoy: thank you for your remarks. Actually, all of the sites and blogs you mention (NYTimes (Krugman), Washington Post (Klein), the Washington Monthly as a whole, Huffington Post, Talkingpoints Memo, The American Prospect) are very much part of the 2500 political sites we monitor for this research, including Salon.com. I think there may be a confusion with the previous thread regarding the map which “only” includes about 800 sites (for clarity of visualization purposes). You raised some good points about some sites in that map and we’ve taken them into account. The map however is only a partial representation of the universe of sites we monitor through our “linkscape” dashboard ( http://us.linkfluence.net/blog/2009/06/29/linkscape-an-inside-look/).
As for a site like DailyKos, our dashboard monitors individual blog posts, which are well into the 3-digits for the past 15 days indeed.
@sk the blogs you read probably post several times a day indeed, and very big blogs have posted dozens if not hundred of posts about healthcare over that period of time. But for every large, hyper-active blog, there are hundreds of small blogs with lower rates of publication.
Now I realize LG’s post is satirical in nature. Brilliant, you had me fooled for a minute.
LG’s post:
“perhaps its based on the fact that republicans are such sore losers still to this day, and feel obligated to spew forth the dribble pounded into their gun toting, homophobic, self-entitled bigot minds by the likes of glenn beck, sean hannity, bill o’reilly, and rush limbaugh.”
Definition of a “bigot:”
“a person who is obstinately and irrationally, often intolerantly, devoted to his or her own religion, political party, organization, belief, or opinion, especially one who regards or treats those of differing devotion with hatred and intolerance.”
Interesting.
This story is still worse than worthless because you STILL don’t provide your methodology or data and hide behind anonymity.
Pretty graphs for someone searching “obamacare” that really have zero meaning.
@Fark
We always aim for as much clarity, transparency and cool-mindedness as possible in our analysis of the social web, whatever the topic at hand. I would strongly encourage you to be more specific with respect to the aspects of our analysis of the healthcare debate online that you have difficulties grasping.
As far as anonymity is concerned, we are hardly working undercover, you can find a lot of information about us on http://linkfluence.net/ or by going there for instance: http://blip.tv/search?q=linkfluence
As far as our methods are concerned, you can visit the “Keys” area of this page http://politicosphere.net/map/ to understand how and why we group like-minded websites and blogs (i.e. mostly conservatives and progressive) together and analyse their opinions (based on absolutely all the articles and posts published – and indexed by us – by the 2,500+ websites we monitor) and their efforts to lead the debate as such.
Anthony Hamelle
linkfluence / politicosphere
I always find it interesting that opponents to health care reform argue that it will be the “death to all of us” or “it will restrict our choices” or “medical decisions will be made by bureaucrats”.
It is the current unregulated capitalistic private insurance companies who are actually fulfilling their worst nightmare right now. “Death to us all” – private insurance companies are literally killing patients right now by denying lifesaving care like in the case of Cigna’s denial of Natalie Sarkisyan’s care.
“It will restrict our choices” which is exactly what our private insurers are doing. I have private coverage myself as a medical professional through my hospital who employs me. I’m restricted to a list of doctors I can see and also to only 4 hospitals in the local Tampa Bay area and if I seek medical care outside of this my insurer will put a majority of the financial cost on me so if I want somewhat affordable medical care I’m forced into their restrictive measures.
“Medical decisions will be made by bureaucrats” – in the private insurance market medical decisions aren’t made by myself or my doctor but rather by bureaucrats (executives and internal business analysts) from my private insurers when they decide what is covered and what is not.
Healthcare reform would put a stop to all this and I’ve actually researched for hours on what the best way to achieve this is. Here’s my solutions – http://bit.ly/9QLV8
[...] bloggers seek to flood the internet with this kind of what, frankly can only be called, drivel. Politicosphere found in late July [...]