The recent study; A Tale of Two Blogospheres, Discursive Practices on the Left and Right', published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist makes an interesting if not altogether surprising read, summarized on Phys.org here.
Like the car we drive, or choose not to, and the food we eat, the two poles of the american political sphere approach blogging in distinctly different and revealing ways.
Notably, the authors find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation. Blogs on the left adopt different, and more participatory, technical platforms, comprise significantly fewer sole-authored sites, include user blogs, maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content, include longer narrative and discussion posts, and (among the top half of the blogs in the sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization.
More beyond the idiosyncratically polynomial ornamental content seperator.
Whereas, by contrast;
Blogs from the right adopted more distinct and impermeable boundaries between blog-administrator content and user-contributed material than blogs from the left.
The content of blogs from the right was short and often filtered from others with links provided to outside sources. On the left, by contrast, primary content from blog authors tended to be longer and more elaborate.
Mechanical, architectural and, it would seem, blog design all follow the well known priciple that 'Function dictates Form'. Left leaning platforms tend to be horizontally organized open exchanges of ideas with many opportunities for direct involvement in the political process, 'calls to action'. Right leaning sites tend to be vertical, hierarchical, more or less old school top down megaphones for a small group of individuals with highly constrained opportunities for direct participation by site users, to paraphrase liberally.
I know, I know here is a another academic study confirming what we already believed. It is worthy of note in that it objectively quantifies the precise nature and depth of the differing approaches to the dissemination of ideas, use of emerging technologies and, most interestingly in my estimation it clearly demonstrates the degree to which the Right either misunderstands or is constitutionally unable to grasp and capitalize upon the fundamental nature and transformative power of new media.
Or, to put it simply, give a person a user Id and blog AT him for a season or give him an open platform and blog WITH him for life. (him/her, shem?.....anywho) I wonder what the average syllable count per word is on each side of the great divide.
The principle author Aaron Shaw, works for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard whose site is a great resource for research on the interaction of society and information technology.