This is the second in a series of posts addressing the question: Do blogs have predictive power?

In the first post, I made general comments that blogging communities serve as accelerators, laboratories, and early adopters. To make this more concrete, let's consider the political blogosphere, which is huge in size and very active. Since August my colleague Steve Corman and I have been running, Wonkosphere, which tracks over 1500 conservative, liberal, and independent blogs as they discuss the 2008 presidential race. Here are some observations from our "deep dive":

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1. Political blogs are important to the political process because they surface more news and opinion, and disseminate it more rapidly, than mainstream media (MSM). This can be both a threat and an opportunity to a campaign.

2. Campaigns use the political blogosphere as a laboratory to test the stickiness of their candidate’s messages, and messages about opponents.

3. MSM look to the political blogosphere as an “early adopter” of news and opinion, and thus the political blogs, by paying attention to certain things and ignoring others, determine in part what MSM pays attention to.

So political blogs are predictive because what they pay attention to shapes what MSM and thus the public pay attention to, and because the campaigns listen to the blogs for feedback and adjust their messages accordingly.

Throughout the campaign, campaign-specific blogs were important to organize grassroots, state-level enthusiasm. For Obama, Huckabee, and Edwards, their early wins/near-wins owe a lot to their support in the blogosphere. For Paul it meant unprecedented fundraising. For Thompson it meant he was able to stay in the race twice as long as he otherwise would have (I remember on C-SPAN seeing Fred out in Iowa with a crowd of about 8 people.).

MSM also looked to the blogosphere for signals on who was really number two, and number three and four, and this made a difference in public opinion. Both Dodd and Huckabee very much rose in the public polls after the blogosphere fell in love with them. John McCain's recovery was foreshadowed in the blogosphere well before his primary wins.

More generally, we can say that being popular in a blogging community signifies brand strength, and brand reputation matters a lot when consumers (voters in this case) make a product selection.

In the next post I'll examine the role that bloggers play in diffusing news and opinion.