When Galaxies Collide - Left Blogs Suck Energy From Right Blogs

There was this interesting story regarding blogs that caught my attention:

The left-wing blogosphere is beginning to decidedly pull away from the right wing blogosphere in terms of traffic. This is largely a result of the open embrace of community blogging on the left and the stagnant, anti-meritorious nature of the right-wing blogosphere that pushes new, emerging voices to the margins.

...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.

Apparently the community blog revolution happened, and I didn't notice much going on. Like Andrew Sullivan, I kind of liked spinning away in my tiny little cyberspace fish pond. I read and contribute to the comments at Dailykos, for example, one of the major community sites, but I hadn't paid attention to the Diaries, or RSS, and NOW!: here I am, stuck in nowhere land, with lonely conservatives for company!

Why should the liberal blogs be doing better than the conservative blogs, so suddenly? The most-useful conservative Web Site, Lucianne.com, is still fairly passive in nature: people post links to stories they've seen in the media, and invite comment. The stories are media stories, first and foremost, not your own. In contrast, the liberal sites invite people posting links to comment first, or at least establish the context. If you don't want to link to anything, that's OK too. The latter process requires more thought, and maybe it's healthier. It certainly makes a better read for others.

So, making an effort to catch up with the revolution gone by, I'm investigating this RSS feed stuff, and I've signed up with Bloglines.

After receiving a comment from a reader who found it jarring to see my comments regarding Britney Spears next to political tirades, I thought about splitting my blog into several blogs, based on topic (Musical Theater, Politics, Personal, etc.) I believe I had to pay Blogspot to get them to host images, however, and I wouldn't want to pay too many times, so for the time-being, bunny stories will be found jumbled with war stories. That's the only reason I don't split the Web Log up.

This is not a community site - yet anyway. But there certainly is a logic to creating a Sacramento-area Musical Theater Community Blog, analogous to a chat room or bulletin board, where different people could write reviews, or share news, etc. Maybe one of us will do that sometime soon.....