Swiped from Karl to liven up a slow news night, a lovely rendering of the 297 most influential political websites. The size of the individual circles, I believe, corresponds to the total number of links flowing in and out; the position of each individual circle on the map corresponds to … god knows what. It can’t be a measure of where each site is situated on the ideological spectrum vis-a-vis another since this has us considerably further right than The Corner, Human Events, and Red State, and, er, I’m pretty sure we’re not. Also curious: Sites are divided into “conservative” and “conservative infopit,” with no apparent rhyme or reason as to why. I’m gratified that we’re in the latter category since I’ve always conceived of HA as first and foremost a news aggregator and only secondarily a partisan blog, but somehow Instapundit ended up in the former category (along with MM). How’d that happen? For what it’s worth, “conservative infopits” are the rarest of the six different types categorized on the map, although “liberal infopits” are only slightly more common. I’m not sure if that’s gratifying, as a mark of distinction, or … worrisome.

As you poke around, keep an eye out for the LA Times. They’re not in the category you’d expect, but that’s not to suggest they’re in the wrong category. Click the image to proceed.

Update: Ah, here’s the map key explaining positioning. Looks like it’s a matter of where your inbound links come from; hence the centrist position of pure infopits, i.e. newspapers, which get links from both the left and the right. Based on this data, HA’s links come from more partisan sources than Red State’s do, a surprising find.