The Web: The battle of the bloggers
By Gene J. Koprowski
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Published March 23, 2005
CHICAGO -- There may be more liberal blogs than conservative ones on the Internet, but the conservatives appear to be much more adept at employing the technology of the medium to market their message and influence public opinion, experts told UPI's The Web.
Take last year's presidential election. Research shows conservatives used the blogs -- a contraction for the term, Web logs -- to talk down Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry on the Internet, perhaps making themselves one of the decisive factors in the November election's outcome.
"Who were the bloggers writing about?" asks the new report, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog, from Intelliseek's BlogPulse project." It answers its own question, "Curiously, 59 percent of the mentions of John Kerry came from right-leaning bloggers, while 53 percent of the mentions of George W. Bush came from left-leaning bloggers."
The study was conducted by Natalie Glance of Intelliseek, a marketing intelligence firm in Cincinnati, and Lada Adamic of HP Labs, the main laboratory for Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif. It showed that of the 1,494 most influential blogs, during the two months leading up to the election, 759 were liberal in worldview, while 735 were conservative. The conservatives, however, showed a "greater tendency" to link to other blogs than did the liberals -- on average 15.1 links per conservative blog to 13.6 for the liberals. That made them more powerful agents of persuasion.
"We've been looking at blogs for about a year," Glance said. "There was some hope that the blogosphere would help bridge the different opinions in America, but what we are seeing is in an election year, it was divisive online and there was a strong tendency for separation of differences."
Conservative blogs apparently were the most influential sites, generating huge flows of traffic to right-leaning news organizations, such as the National Review magazine and Fox News television. The bloggers' links also pushed up the readership numbers for publications such as The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal and The Washington Times, Glance said.
Other experts said the trend is likely to continue, and it is starting to shape the way businesses are perceived, too, not just politicians.
"There is a democratization of media going on before our eyes," said Scott Anthony, co-author of "Seeing What's Next" (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), and a partner in Innosight LLC in Watertown, Mass. "A small number of people used to determine what was, or was not, newsworthy. Now, it is an online collective that says this is interesting, or not interesting, news."
Anthony said this is an example of "disruptive innovation" in the media business, which has a parallel to the rise of the personal computer back in the late 1970s.
"Disruptive innovation uses relatively cheap, relatively simple technologies to give people what they want," Anthony told The Web. "Look at the early days of the computer industry. Back then, Digital Equipment Corp. looked at the (personal computer) and saw no reason why anyone would want one in their home -- but people were delighted with product."
Anthony predicted that 20 years from now, there will be an entirely new industry based on blogs. Just a few years ago, he noted, when eBay was launched, it was selling novelty items, such as Pez candy dispensers. Today, it is a major retail force that even sells automobiles.
"The established media companies are going to have to deal with the blogs," Anthony said. "This pattern of starting simply and expanding will have profound effects. Thirty years ago, Digital Equipment had delighted customers, and sound management principles, like listening to their customers, but the wave of change caused by the PC overwhelmed them."
The blogging phenomenon is challenging local media as well as the national giants. In Chicago, for example, the newspapers have not devoted much attention to a measure that local conservatives view as important: Senate Bill 2033, which calls for the direct election of GOP state central committeemen in Illinois. Yet the bill is being promoted via a simple blog by Joseph A. Morris, a former Reagan administration lawyer who is now an attorney in private practice in Chicago. He holds forth at illinoiscenterright.com.
The blog is marketed by e-mails from conservative Web sites, such as the local affiliate of Townhall.com, run by activist Rich Johns. Rather than waiting for the Chicago Tribune to write about the story, for example, the blog reports and comments on its own.
Search engines dedicated to blogging, such as technorati, help fans find the info they want. Really simple syndication, or RSS, technology provides short descriptions of Web content and links to the search engines.
"Right-wing blogs have very coherent message delivery," Glance said.
Traditionally, conservative business people are also now using blogs to promote their enterprises online. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review called on businesses to embrace the trend.
In a marketing switch, the business bloggers embrace -- rather than eschew -- controversy to generate business. One Chicago blogger, entrepreneur Kirsten Osolind, has been posting an ongoing debate with a conservative business pundit, Seth Godin, on her site, reinventioninc.blogspot.com.
Osolind has received feedback calling her "catty," which she does not think she would have received if she were a male blogger. However, the tool of controversy seems to have worked for her, because she is being wooed by advertisers such as Home Depot, who want to place ads on her site, and she has landed a column with Entrepreneur Magazine.
"The whole blogosphere is a fascinating space -- a movement really," Anthony said. "Rather than having conservatives say they are unhappy about biased liberal news, or liberals saying they are unhappy about biased conservative news, everyone goes where they are happy. The old gray lady (The New York Times) does not determine what we read anymore. It is a different world."
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Gene J. Koprowski is a 2004 Winner of a Lilly Endowment Award for this column for United Press International. He covers telecommunications technologies for UPI Science News. |
