Blog Readers Up 45% in Q1 (Free Republic #1)

U.S. blog readership in the first quarter jumped 45 percent to 49.5 million people, or one-sixth of the total U.S. population, a report said Monday, suggesting the blogosphere is becoming increasingly alluring to online advertisers.

The increase means 30 percent of U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the quarter, according to the comScore Media Metrix report.

In the quarter, Google’s Blogspot had 19 million unique visitors, which comScore noted was more than big mainstream media sites NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, and WashingtonPost.com. However, these visitors were spread around Blogspot’s millions of individual sites.

As far as advertisers are concerned, blog readers are a desirable demographic—young, wealthy, likely to shop online, and with high-speed Internet connections. They visit 77 percent more web pages than the average Internet user.

The most popular blogs were Free Republic with 3.6 million visitors, Drudge Report with 2.3 million, Fleshbot (a Gawker Media blog) with 1.2 million, followed by Gawker and Fark, both with 1.1 million. Regularly updated blogs won a huge portion of the overall visits. Drudge Report alone had 44.3 million visits.

Most popular were political blogs followed by “hipster” lifestyle blogs, tech blogs, and blogs written by women, comScore noted.

However, blog readership tails off rather quickly, with the majority of blogs having under 100 visitors a day, according to Rick Bruner, director of research for DoubleClick, who co-authored the comScore report.

The comScore data does not address these smaller blogs as many are merged with all the other blogs hosted by the same domain, as in the case of Six Apart’s TypePad. Others simply did not make the cut, as the list was limited to the Top 400 most-trafficked blog domains. All but one of the blog domains used in the report had more than 1,000 unique visitors.

Down the Food Chain
In Mr. Bruner’s opinion, the high price of advertising on top sites will lead companies to “start looking deeper down the food chain for more affordable advertising.” He estimated that about half of total page views on the Internet are to small sites.

Last week, Technorati announced that it had measured 14.2 million blogs, 55 percent of them active, about double the amount in March. The company counted 900,000 new posts per day in July, nearly double the amount in January (see Blogs: 900,000 Posts a Day).

Mr. Bruner said that the Technorati numbers give credence to comScore’s report. But, he said, “They’re not really comparable. Technorati can spider links, but they can’t actually look at traffic.”

An international report that combines blog creation with blog readerships of all sizes has yet to be completed.

MOONBAT BLOG TAXONOMY

Mithras, who runs the liberal site Fables of Reconstruction, posted what he terms “A Conservative Blog Taxonomy.” It’s actually a very clever idea. And given that I’m a shameless and inveterate thief when it comes to harvesting ideas to feed this personal demon of a blog, I thought it might be interesting to duplicate the moonbat’s efforts and see what I could come up with in creating a “Moonbat Blog Taxonomy.”

Now taxonomy is generally defined in biology as an “orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships.” This posed something of a problem since there’s no such thing as “natural relationships” when it comes to moonbats. In fact, there’s nothing natural at all about liberals in that you have to make a preternatural effort day in and day out to exhibit that amount of cluelessness regarding the world around you as it actually exists.

Be that as it may, in researching the subject, I arrived at a solution to my dilemma; categorize the sites using as a benchmark how far the blog deviates from the real world and descends into conspiratorial fantasy.

I discovered that the more forcefully the denizens of these sites bragged about being a member of the “Reality Based Community” the farther they actually were from existing on the same plane of the universe as the rest of us. Some maintain a passing familiarity with reality – as if reality were like walking past a beautiful woman and getting a tantalizing whiff of an exotic perfume. Others have had reality slap them upside the head and still deny the evidence of it with their own eyes and ears.

A “Reality Quotient” (RQ) will be assigned each site in order to rank their moonbattiness. A rank of “5” indicates a firm foothold on reality. A rank of “1” indicates a trip back to planet earth is in order.

KEVIN DRUM

Kevin Drum’s blog The Political Animal swings wildly between well written analyses of politics, the economy, and current events and a sniveling, simpering condescension that grates on the mind like a fingernail run across a blackboard grates on the ears. His famous “A Few Wee Questions” for hawks on the Iraq war became the source of much hilarity on the right as well as conservative blog fodder for weeks. Not above letting his Bush hatred cloud his judgement.

RQ: 4.5

TALKLEFT

I’ve always found Jeralyn Merrit’s Talkleft to be island of reason in a sea of liberal idiocy.

When you think about it, that’s not saying much.

Merrit’s a smart, savvy attorney who knows criminal law but whose political judgement is, shall we say, wanting…As in “wanting one iota of political horsesense.” Like all other lefty bloggers, her posts on the Gannon/Guckert imbroglio got to be like watching an epileptic rolling around on the floor having a fit. Everyone else in the vicinity was wondering what the big deal was.

RQ: 4.1

WONKETTE

I’ve never understood the fascination with Wonkette AKA Anna Marie Cox. Maybe it’s the three names which make her sound mysterious. Maybe it’s the penis jokes which make her sound slutty. It can’t be her personal appearance. She looks like a pushing 40, pre-middle aged, dumpy, lumpy, policy maven.

She believes she can elevate snark to the level of political discourse as she gossips her way through the bedrooms, board rooms, and dining rooms of Washington. What passes for “information” is really just a regurgitation of news clippings and other blog posts with a smattering of innocuous, inane commentary. Not ill informed, just colorless with tepid attempts at humor. No insight. No original thinking. Dull, drab, almost humorless, and totally without redeeming value. In short, a waste of time and bandwidth.

RQ: 4.0

MYDD

The duo of Jerome Armstrong and Chris Bowers at MyDD are perhaps the biggest purveyors of Democratic spin in the blogosphere. A paid consultant for the Dean campaign, Armstrong has a knack for being more wrong about more things political than any other big blogger I’ve seen. His analysis is shallow and trite. His writing is, well, boring. Vomiting up Democratic talking points on everything from the WoT to the Rove-Wilson-Plame affair, I have yet to see an original position taken in opposition to anything the Democrats have done.

RQ: 3.6

ESCHATON

Atrios AKA Duncan Black runs the site Eschaton. I’d call Mr. Black a snake in the grass but that would be insulting snakes, grass, and the sun that gives life to both of them. A true leftist lickspittle his “community” is the most vulgar, most obscenely obnoxious group of party hacks around. Black has been known to sic his minions on bloggers who displease him. A real class act.

RQ: 3.1

OLIVER WILLIS

If there was ever a more irrelevant hysteric on the left side of the sphere than Oliver Willis I haven’t discovered him yet. Famous for putting a “countdown” clock at the top of his blog counting the days that Brit Hume hadn’t resigned for , as Oliver put it so rationally: ” Hume intentionally manipulated the words of the 32nd president, Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt to make it appear as if FDR supported privatization of social security. This is a brazenly false falsehood.” After about a month, Mr. Willis removed the clock from his blog but not before several conservative bloggers razzed him hilariously.

Willis’ conspiracy mongering about everything from the 2004 election to Jeff Gannon reveals a pathological resistance to reality that makes him one of the top 5 cluebats on the left.

RQ: 2.4

AMERICABLOG

Even just typing the name makes me feel unclean. John Aravosis of Americablog is a walking argument for Internet regulation (too bad I adamantly oppose it). The nauseating way in which he “outed” Jeff Gannon by publishing nude pictures of the quasi-journalist along with the suggestion that Gannon may have been a gay escort at one time, sickened decent people everywhere. The fact that he was cheered on by other lefty bloggers tells you all you need to know about the hypocrisy that drips from the snarling lips of the radical lefties.

The “conspiracy” pushed by Aravosis had Gannon sleeping with every male in the White House including the President. The fact that even the White House press corps let out a collective yawn at the whole affair proves that not only was there nothing to the story, but that some harmless twit of a conservative writer who wanted to hide his identity was unceremoniously outed by people with no integrity and no honor.

RQ: 1.4

THE HUFFINGTON POST

There are so many loons, goons, and poltroons who write for Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post that you all you have to do to find someone totally disconnected from reality is close your eyes, point, and click. It’s hard to say whether the B-list celebrities or C-list journalists who write for the site are more irrelevant. And Arianna herself presides over these mountebanks like a Queen of Tarts, jostling with the dozen or so posters for the honor of being named “Conservative Cannon Fodder for a Day.” There is no site out side of the Democratic Underground whose writers are more regularly nor more completely fisked.

RQ: 1.1

DAILY KOS

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga AKA Kos, AKA “Screw ‘em” Kos is possibly the worst thing to happen to the Democratic party since George McGovern. His ability to raise money from his legions of conspiracy mongering, paranoid readers makes him absolutely indispensable to the party’s infrastructure. Just recently, he almost singlehandedly took an unknown attorney and Iraqi War vet Paul “Two-faced” Hackett and, by raising nearly a half a million dollars in a fortnight, put him within spitting distance of winning the special election in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District.

What makes Kos such a ball and chain for the Democratic party is that despite his ability to raise money, the fantastical conspiracies given prominence on his site regarding Bush, the war, elections, Gannon/Guckert, Rove (again and again), Cheney, Halliburton, and on and on – give the party a patina of psychosis that leaves conservatives laughing and rational Democrats scratching their heads. His “0 for 16” record when supporting a Democratic candidate also prove he’s a loser. If he couldn’t raise money, he’d be out of business since a political consultant is only as good as his won-loss record. And without the conspiratorial nature of his site, he’d lose half of his considerable readership. They’d simply pack up and go someplace that will feed their constant paranoia that the world is against them.

RQ: 0.4

DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND

I actually have a soft spot in my heart for the inmates at the Democratic Underground. Let’s face it; the Internet just wouldn’t be the same without them. It’s become a matter of course for me that whenever I’ve got writer’s block, I visit the DU and, within 5 minutes, find something so outrageous, so far beyond the pale, that my dilemma regarding what to write about disappears in a flash. I wear their disapprobation like a badge of honor.

Perhaps one illustration of their complete disconnect from reality is in order. Following the tsunami tragedy last December, a comment thread at the site started to speculate that, in fact, secret US government tests in the ocean caused the giant waves. The comments got loonier and loonier as the DU’ers speculated that the earth itself was falling apart:

Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the “bones” of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?

You just can’t make this stuff up.

For DU’ers, every election is stolen, every setback by Democrats is the result of a plot by Karl Rove, and everything else is Halliburton’s fault. In short, when looking for sanity at the Democratic Underground, it’s best to remember the sign that Dante Alighieri saw at the gates of hell in his poem “The Divine Comedy:

“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

-- http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2005/08/05/moonbat-blog-taxonomy/

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