In earlier posts (one, two, three) I’ve discussed how blogs can be predictive of popular opinion. The main reason is that blogs acts as early adopters of news stories and ideology, and vet these for the broader public.

I want to bring your attention to some patterns we’ve noticed about Wonkosphere which shed some light on how we should think about the role of bloggers in the current political process (so-called Politics 2.0).

First, political blogs are consumed in much the same manner as mainstream media is, which indicates that readers treat political blogs not as seperate from, but rather as part of, mainstream media. Wonkosphere traffic is greatest on Monday, and tends to peak before breakfast, lunch and dinner, i.e. when people are cruising on the net to end a portion of their work day. Blogs act as newspapers for most readers.

Second, very few blogs break stories. It is a myth. From our data, the vast majority of bloggers still rely on mainstream media for the content they comment on. In fact, a blogger is more likely to cite mainstream media as they are another blogger. Thus, bloggers are primarily amplifiers rather than sources of news.

Third, the popularity of political blogs tends to follow a Pareto (power) law, meaning that there are a few blogs that have a very large number of readers while most blogs have few readers. This means that the influence of blogs is also so distributed, leading to elite blogs (e.g. MyDD, Hot Air), in the same way we have elite mainstream media sources (e.g. New York Times, Newsweek).

Put together, these patterns imply that political blogs are acting as supplements to mainstream media, rather than substitutes for it. The impact on the system is more volatility–blogs make most news spread faster, but sometimes it’s slower; blogs spread both fact and opinion, truth and slander more rapidly; only a few blogs influence opinion most of the time, but any single blog has the potential to impact everyone; and the blogsphere both enables extreme candidate-inevitability and the potential for anyone to come-from-behind in a shocker.