I recently launched a F/OSS system for tracking activity on political blogs called
SHELOB (Shelob Helps Examine Links on Blogs). Shelob gathers snowball samples from twenty seed blogs each day (ten conservative, ten progressive), looks for the most-linked items, draws network visualizations, and let's me look at the
kind of pages being linked to on each side. It's still in beta, still kinda buggy, but I'm starting to get some really interesting results from it...
Most of my work focuses on trying to understand the structure of the blogosphere: how stories and frames percolate up from the netroots and make the jump from blogs to the mainstream media (and vice versa). Over the last few days, our side has been going nuts linking to minor items like
Brownie's pressing dinner engagements, the
Vice President's role in the push for war in Iraq, and the
intricacies -
of the -
Plame case.
On the right, however, all bets are off... IT'S OPEN TRACKBACK FRIDAY!!1!!1!!eleven!!
I'm joking, but this has been a real trend for as long as I have been doing these crawls... progressives are hitting issues, conservatives are tuning out and talking to themselves. One can make the argument that they're replacing the media... I'd argue otherwise, more on that later. If people on DailyKos are interested in this stuff, I can do some more in-depth analysis... leave a comment.