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.

In the previous posts (part 1, part 2), the conclusion to this question based on analysis of the political blogosphere was: you bet. Political blogs can create and rapidly diffuse stories and opinion in a way that mainstream media cannot. Now let me turn the question around a bit, and ask: Are political bloggers predictive?

Everett Rogers was one of our great American thinkers, and his classic book “Diffusion of Innovations” is the bible concerning how both tangible innovations (like a product) and intangible innovations (like an idea) diffuse in a society. He identified that there are different “types” of people per when they adopt: first innovators adopt, then early adopters, early majority, late majority, and finally laggards. In his theory, early adopters are the most important group in terms of the likelihood of broad difussion, as they take the bold ideas from the innovators and mold them for adoption by the pragmatic early majority.

In a political context, the innovation in Roger’s model is ideology, political bloggers are both innovators and early adopters, primary voters are the early majority, and swing voters are the late majority.

Will bloggers vote in the same way that the general populace does? According to Roger’s theory, the answer would be yes. As people at the front-end of the adoption curve, bloggers have to “adopt” before the general populace does. Not all bloggers adopt the same idea–as ideological leaders, their views are going to tend to be more intense and diverse, and more ideological and less pragmatic. Nevertheless, bloggers in the aggregate will tend to move ahead of the curve and thus be predictive.

Imagine a funnel of political ideas. At the front-end of the funnel, many ideas exist in the ideological soup. Bloggers who are innovators, and the political campaigns, create these innovations, and bloggers who are early adopters select and shape those ideological innovations in such a way that they are attractive to the early majority, i.e. the primary voter.

I suspect the same dynamic in a commercial context. Early product adopters are the first to experience a new product, and are of a personality type that loves to share experiences with others, i.e. they are the ideal bloggers. If bloggers are positive, it's a good bet that the new product or service will take off. If bloggers are not paying attention, that's bad news. If bloggers are paying attention but negative, the situation may be salvagable, if you can listen to their complaints and take action.