Right v. Left

Kos on the differences between the left and right sides of the blogosphere:

It boggles the mind to thing that three years ago, the conservative side had about twice the traffic of the liberal side. Nowadays, the liberal side gets about 65 percent more traffic than the conservatives, even though they boast larger numbers of sites.

Hugh Hewitt, at a recent panel discussion, argued that lack of comments made for a more vibrant conservative blogosphere than its liberal counterpart. If by "more vibrant" he meant comparatively lower and stagnant traffic and the power of a handful of top-tier bloggers to control who is heard, and when s/he is heard, then I guess he was right.

I'll admit that I was still under the impression that the right was dominant in the 'sphere. I think that impression comes from the fact that many of the 'top 100' are conservatives. But the post that Kos links to makes the case that this is because the lefty blogs are more 'community' centered - meaning that they give a voice to more people - whereas the righty blogs aren't, thus forcing any conservative who wants to be heard to start his own blog. Thus there are more righty blogs in general, but apparently even together they are out-trafficked by the lefties.

... For example:

Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Café, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter, BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls. By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four conservative blogs. None, zip, zero, nada. This is particularly stunning when one considers the importance of the Free Republic community to the conservative netroots. While it would appear that there are hordes of Glenn Reynolds wannabe's among conservatives in the netroots, Redstate.org sticks out as the only success story for a community oriented blog within the conservative blogosphere. In fact, of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one, Little Green Footballs, even allows comments, much less the ability to actually write a diary or a new article.

It should also be noted that while Atrios, one of the top liberal bloggers, is not technically a 'community' site, a fairly vibrant community of commenters has sprung up around Eschaton nonetheless.