bloggadocio

i wrote this hours ago, but srn was suffering from yet another bout of chronic unscheduled downtime, so i've been unable to actually post...

so yeah, i've been reading more blogs the past few days, because just browsing headlines at sites like google news or buzzflash isn't really using the power of blogging to its full advantage, right?

so the other day i came across a link (probably on dailykos) to an analysis on mydd comparing the top right-wing and left-wing politiblogs. there are some interesting conclusions there about why/how the right-wing blogs have been more effective at pushing stories into the mainstream media (see "memogate", for example). there's also some interesting stuff about "stickiness":

The lower the stickiness of a blog, the higher the relative traffic value of a link from that blog to the blog being linked. In other words, a blog where there isn't much to do besides visit (no comments, few or no special pages, short articles), will cause a higher percentage of its traffic base to visit a blog that it links than will a blog with high stickiness (diaries, long articles,
polls, comments, arguments, many special pages, etc).

i like comments, and stickiness. it's very nice to see people commenting on my posts, even if the posters tend to be from a small subsection of my circle of friends (there are exceptions, like when the great white hype replied to my post about him or the guy who seemingly posted a comment to my "rev moon coronation" post simply to pimp his book on the subject).

another nice thing about the mydd analysis is that it lists/links to the top 7 politiblogs (on both the right and the left, in terms of traffic), so i've taken the opportunity to browse through all seven progressive blogs, a couple of which i hadn't been very familiar with.

that's a lot of stuff to read, since some of them (especially dailykos) have quite a lot of content. one of the most interesting phenomena at sites like dkos are the "open threads". these are threads where the actual poster doesn't post any content at all (!), leaving it up to the commenters to take control of the discussion and see where it leads. these aren't small threads either: some have 200-300 comments or more! that's a lot of stuff to wade through: some of it's very high-quality, but wow, so much material...

on one of those blogs (i thought it was atrios but i can't find the post) linked to this site, which lists a bunch of progressive blogs organized by state. naturally, indiana is colored in pink to indicate the strong hold that the GOP has over all the rednecks and corn farmers here.

i went through some of the indiana blogs and stumbled across a blog by one of my co-workers (at least she works for the same parent company, in the same building) where there was a nice post about the awful "auto-flushing" toilets here in the building, which constantly
malfunction.

speaking of malfunctioning, i noticed on steph's blog that she was a member of a few webrings: indianapolis blogs and indiana blogs. the links didn't work in any logical fashion (sometimes clicking next or prev would take you to the same site, and the random link wasn't very random) but i browsed through some of the indiana blogs for awhile... i found a few progressive blogs, a few more conservative blogs (highlight: andrew sullivan is a "traitor" for daring to back down from his once-fawning deification of bush), and countless "day in the life of a college student" blogs.

that's a lot of blogreading, & i haven't even gotten my friends' personal blogs (tfy, quahogs, your girlfriend, &c.)