So…

Whose the bigger dork? The blogger? Or the blog reader?

lorien1973 on March 29, 2007 at 11:30 PM

The blogger who not only reads, but comments.

Dammit, I have to stop falling for that :-)

Seriously, Socrates and those who listened to his speeches probably got asked the ancient-Greek version of that question.

Oh well…their loss.

Whose the bigger dork? The blogger? Or the blog reader?

As for Kos, too low of a signal to noise ratio. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve read something there and regretted every instance of it and I’m a regular blog reader. Thing about Kos is you don’t need to read it to know what they are going to say. I can just negate any conservative blog and get the liberal position. They don’t appear to have any original ideas just a knee-jerk reaction to be anti-conservative.

Allah doesn’t buy it, and I guess I don’t either. When you’re down to such low numbers the MoE is pretty big compared to the number itself. 6% of the country isn’t reading independent political blogs, bit they are reading……

People just don’t care as long as their iPod works, there’s gas at the pump, and the supermarket is open. They can’t be bothered with world events.

crosspatch on March 29, 2007 at 7:35 PM

Unfortunately, they vote.

I do visit kos maybe once a month, but usually spend less than 30 minutes there. They spend more time actually organizing to fight Republicans than we do to fight them. But they are obsessed with finding dirt and if they can’t find any, they make it up. With all the elected reps who read there, they know their efforts will not go unnoticed.

Either Dean’s way off or the poll’s way off. Or I’m way off in thinking even 15% of Republicans are all that engaged. Exit question: Which is it?

I’ll go with you being closest (though I noticed that you didn’t take the far side of the blogosphere into account):
- Fox News’ suggested 12 million (give or take a million) that follow blogs is way off because political polls by nature oversample the politically-active. While this doesn’t matter too much for stuff like Presidential popularity, the errors really show up when the pollster asks whether one follows political commentary.
- Similarily, Barnett’s off in suggesting less than 1 million total. I’ll take a slightly-different route than you did though (that’s not 9% of politically-active self-identified Republicans, that’s 9% of all self-identified Pubbies). The baseline of those that are politically active is the number of those that participate in a strictly-local general election. That is roughly 6%, or the 12 million suggested by Fox above. Somewhere around half don’t have regular access to the Internet, so that chops our potential audience to 6 million. I highly doubt that less than 1 in 6 of those regularily read at least 1 blog a day. After all, even my hole-in-the-wall has somewhere north of 35 regular readers (whether or not I post that day).

Daily Kos? What is that?

What needs to happen is a Rupert Murdoch or someone like him needs to buy a broadcast (not cable) network and a newspaper chain and apply the same standards as that of the Fox News cable TV network. THEN we can get some people informed. Until then, it doesn’t matter because our votes are so far down in the grass that it is just “noise”. Until that AM station and newspaper carry information like Fox does, people are just not going to get it.

I hate listening to Hannity or Hewitt and then at the top of the hour hearing ABC Radio’s broadcast news. It just sucks.

People just don’t care as long as their iPod works, there’s gas at the pump, and the supermarket is open. They can’t be bothered with world events.

For example, if I even read the local paper, I read all the articles about politcs and foreign policy. I skim local sections. Many people I know exclusively read local sections and pay no interest to national stories.

The real question is not what % of the population reads blogs, it is what % of people that care about politics and worlds events do. Some people focus more on what thier Mayor is doing then the President. The problem with media bias is those people are easily led astray by the healines.