Blog Citations for the 2004 Campaign
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James Joyner | Tuesday, November 23, 2004 |
Intelliseek’s BlogPulse ranked the most-cited blogs during the campaign season. OTB cracked the top 30 with Drudge Report (not a blog!) number one, followed by Daily Kos, InstaPundit, and Eschaton.
While I’m happy to have made the cut, I agree with Bill at INDC Journal that there are some serious methodological issues here.
Note that all measures of influence track the number of citations of blogs or media sources by bloggers only; the analysis measures links and not traffic. If they’d included a traffic comparison, Drudge would rank near the New York Times. Also, Drudge’s influence among bloggers is vastly underrepresented by a tally of links because he doesn’t have permanent links to his individual items; bloggers just link directly to the story that he features and usually don’t assign credit. This is a major caveat to the study.
Further, as BlogPulse goes on to note, even bloggers prefer MSM sources:
Bill’s objections apply here, too, of course. Still, the fact that OTB or INDC Journal–or even InstaPundit–manages to get even a meaningful fraction of the citations that the NYT or WaPo get is amazing. Not only do those outlets have the advantage of being well-established, they’re manned by hundreds of full timers. That people spending a few hours a week typing and publishing their own web pages can compete against that at all is more than I’d have expected when I started this operation last January.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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Very Nice considering I know that Wizbang and Captains Quarters attend the RNC I would expect them the place a little higher, just from the additional attention. OTB did fairly respectably.
Ugh. Kos should not be ahead of Instapundit.
I suppose this shows that the left really was very fired up about the election. Will we be hungry in 2008? I know they will be.
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