Watching The Watchers

A couple of U.S. academics are tracking the political blogosphere this election cycle, and the upshot is they may just have a good tool for readers who want to get a panoramic view of blog-thought. From US News:

The idea of reading a thousand political blogs every day might seem like Geneva-worthy torture, but it’s hard to deny that there’s some sort of useful information coming out of the blogosphere. Now the good news: you needn’t actually read the blogs to find out what it is.

Wonkosphere.com, which formally launched this week, aggregates posts from about 1,000 political blogs of all types and stripes, whether run by a newspaper or magazine or someone in his parents’ basement, and extracts trends and patterns. Every four hours, the site updates the information with which presidential candidates have the most buzz among bloggers, as well as how mean or nice that buzz is. Blogs are split into conservative, liberal, or independent, and they don’t include those from official candidate sites.

In this way, the site’s designers, two Arizona State University professors who run a company called Crawdad Technologies, say they hope to capture the collective conscience of the blogosphere at any given time, while also collecting a lot of data that they can eventually sell to analysts down the road. In the meantime, the site is a way to save readers a lot of time by identifying the hottest links of the day.

Wonkosphere.com uses patented software to “read” every new post from the directory of blogs and analyze them using a sophisticated linguistic technique known as “centering theory,” which identifies the most important words in a text. By contrast, most media organizations doing text analysis merely identify the most common thematic words in a speech or text. Centering theory is a more sophisticated way of doing this, says cofounder Kevin Dooley, a professor at the ASU business school. This theory, he says, produces a “network representation of the text,” in which the important words span the boundaries between others.

It is still early days yet, but the Wonkosphere site is promising. In terms of the number of blogs they are following it is hardly exhaustive. Right now they have 608 Conservative, 373 Liberal and 24 Independent blogs. (The Gazette isn’t one of them at the moment, but I sent them a note suggesting they check us out.) However, as they add content that should be able to generate a compelling view of the blogosphere.

 Here is an example of the sort of data they generate:

 

It will be interesting to see how these measures play out over a longer period of time, and how they react to the events of the campaign trail.  It will also show if there is anything predictiveto be learned from the political blogs. As of right now I would say blogs would hold almost no predictive power, and for a very good reason. Everyone can be who and what they want to be on the internet. If they want to see the world through an ideological prism, then that is exactly what they will do. Folks who engage in this kind of thinking, on the left and right, see the world the way they wish to see the world. It is not a reflection of reality.  It is this separation from reality that will keep the political blogosphere from being terribly predictive.

The self proclaimed independent blogs may be a different story, but we shall have to see. (I notice The Moderate Voice is considered a liberal blog by the Wonkosphere folks. That should be an uncontroversial opinion here by the look of things.) In the end this may prove to be a useful tool for figuring out who represents an actual “reality based” community.