Ari Melber has written a great synthesis for The Nation about the new study “A Tale of Two Blogospheres” produced by a consortium of researchers from Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.

The study details the the structure (and resulting impact) of the left vs. right blogosphere or as they put it, “evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs.” This study completely coincides with the theories we lay out and the stories (and lessons learned) of Firedoglake, Feministing and Talking Points Memo that we detail out in our book Beyond The Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics Through Networked Progressive Media.

Here are a few excerpts from Melber’s piece.

“One of the most striking findings is structural: liberal blogs provide audience participation options at triple the rate of conservative sites. That means visitors to progressive sites are more empowered to contribute entire posts to the “front page,” and more likely to have their contributions or comments highlighted before potentially hundreds of thousands of readers.

According to the authors, the netroots’ early embrace of deeper participation platforms, coupled with progressive bloggers interest in mobilizing fundraising and specific actions, helped prime the tactics and habits that supported the Democrats’ later web dominance (see chart).

The survey data does show that progressive bloggers were far more demanding of their readers.

One out of three liberal sites made direct fundraising pitches, and almost half asked readers to take some political action, according to a section of the study analyzing the top sixty-five blogs. On the right, however, only one out of twenty blogs pushed fundraising, and fewer than one out of five issued “calls to action.”

In the book, we tell the “impact story” of Firedoglake in a chapter titled “Assemble the Progressive Choir.” It demonstrates how FDL has successfully built a site that combines analysis, great acts of journalism, transparency, direct relationships between the bloggers and the community, a community forum, calls for action and fundraising (for the site itself and for political campaigns) to become one of the most successful progressive political blogs today.

I hope that both the blogosphere and the rapidly evolving legacy progressive media take heed from both the study and our book and continues with the much needed experimentation and implementation of community engagement, building and mobilization that will continue to build the overall impact of their journalism and messaging. It’s good for business. It’s good for impact.

This image summarizes the significant differences between the left and right blogosphere analyzed in the new study, “A Tale of Two Blogospheres.” (Click for larger image.)

List of top 30 Feminist blogs, according to linkfluence

I (unfortunately) wasn’t at the Fem 2.0 conference, but I saw a recent post about the happenings over there. A really interesting group called Linkfluence (they visually mapped the sphere of influence of progressive and conservative blogs during the election) presented on the their visual map of the feminist web and made a list of the top 30 feminist blogs (according to their methodology).

Here’s background, the list and a password to see the map. And Sarah Granger over at Personal Democracy Forum gives us more background on why a map like this is useful and what it tells us.

When the data is compared with the political web, mashed up with it, it’s apparent how embedded within the progressive blogosphere the feminist web is, although it is definitely its own community as well, and how it’s more centrist than fringe on the map. Part of the discussion at Fem 2.0 was about how to reach out and get more traction on issues on other sites not necessarily considered “feminist” by their statistics, and the data shows that these sites dedicated to the discussion for and by women are not operating in an echo chamber.

Once you get to the map, you should click on the different dots (they represent individual blogs. The colored lines represent how the different sites are connecting to each other.
Red lines = who’s linking into that site.
Yellow lines = who that site is linking to
Green lines = mutual links

Check it out. It’s extremely interesting. Any blogs you’re surprised to see? What blogs are you surprised NOT to see?