It’s been a busy week in the politicosphere, with heavy coverage and discussions about three prominent news topics: the war in Afghanistan and the need for more troops, the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council resolution, and the perennial health care reform debate.

News Trends - Content published across a sample of 13 000 sites

What’s newsworthy –or blogworthy- however largely depends on which part of the web you’re looking at, or which community one hails from. By and large, health care reform remains the dominant topic of discussion within the conservative and progressive communities.

Out of a sample of 1202 conservative blogs and 1190 progressive blogs, health care reform accounted for 9.7% and 12.3% of new content respectively during the week of Sept. 21 to Sept. 27. By comparison, discussions about the need for more troops in Afghanistan “only” accounted for 4.8% of content published on the conservative side vs. 3.5 on the liberal side. The same topic however fired up the Defense (23.1%) and International Affairs (15.7%) communities which naturally dedicated more content to this topic than any other this week.

Visualization of publishing activity within both communities

The International Affairs community got even busier by the second half of the week with a series of news coming out of the United Nations General Assembly, environment summit and security council resolution. The environmental community got stirred up as well by the U.N. Climate Summit in the run-up to Copenhagen.

Let’s see next week if the G-20 summit manages to garner as much attention.