Friday, September 17, 2004
SWIFT AND NON-STICKY RED MEMES
The left side of the blogosphere has watched with consternation the swift ascent (from comment to blog to major media story in the time it takes to commute to work) of the forgery charge that spawned RatherGate. And now, they've come up with a theory to explain it:
Nope, the sheer lusciousness of the story had nothing to do with it. It's not every day we get to see a pompous media figurehead come face to face with the inconvenient fact he ignored to make his pretty story--although maybe it'll happen more often now that the blogosphere has started flexing its muscles. Nor did the story's apparent truth affect its meteoric rise. It was the non-stickiness of the right-wing blogs, dammit!
Then again, theories are fun. We at Spitbull like to have fun. So here's our theory: (1). Since the mainstream media already leans left, there's more demand from right side of the blogosphere than from the left for alternative or corrective news coverage. (2). Since the best talent on the left has already been sucked up by the mainstream media (see #1), the overall quality of the right side of the blogosphere, particularly at its upper reaches, is higher than that of the left. Would-be top lefty bloggers end up writing for the New York Times and Washington Post instead; would-be righty MSM writers get real jobs and blog in their spare time.
Now wasn't that fun? And pleasingly non-sticky.
[T]he lower stickiness of top right-wing blogs compared to top left-wing blogs leads to greater message consistency in their half of the political blogosphere than in ours. ... This consistency helps stories from the right-wing blogosphere reach the national media more often than those from the left-wing blogosphere.Oh yeah, they (specifically, myDD) say "sticky" means a blog has lots of toys for its visitors: "diaries, long articles, polls, comments, arguments, many special pages, etc." and doesn't just consist of links plus short commentary:
High traffic right-wing blogs, such as Andrew Sullivan, Hugh Hewitt, Real Clear Politics, Powerline and especially Instapundit (among the top seven right-wing blogs, only Captain's Quarters and Little Green Footballs have comments), tend to be less sticky than high traffic left wing blogs.Other lefty blogs have adopted the theory and added a splash of conspiracy: "the left seeks to highlight, explain and analyze (the vast majority of the time), whereas the right seeks to aid "their side" in gaining or maintaining power in a Manachean [sic] struggle against their left-liberal "enemies" (the vast majority of the time)."
Nope, the sheer lusciousness of the story had nothing to do with it. It's not every day we get to see a pompous media figurehead come face to face with the inconvenient fact he ignored to make his pretty story--although maybe it'll happen more often now that the blogosphere has started flexing its muscles. Nor did the story's apparent truth affect its meteoric rise. It was the non-stickiness of the right-wing blogs, dammit!
Then again, theories are fun. We at Spitbull like to have fun. So here's our theory: (1). Since the mainstream media already leans left, there's more demand from right side of the blogosphere than from the left for alternative or corrective news coverage. (2). Since the best talent on the left has already been sucked up by the mainstream media (see #1), the overall quality of the right side of the blogosphere, particularly at its upper reaches, is higher than that of the left. Would-be top lefty bloggers end up writing for the New York Times and Washington Post instead; would-be righty MSM writers get real jobs and blog in their spare time.
Now wasn't that fun? And pleasingly non-sticky.
