Politics in the Blogsphere

As the American election approaches, I think political blogs are going to be quite influential. We’ve already seen how they are a force in the Democratic primary. As more politically active bloggers report, passionately, on their politics, the real battle is going to not be in the blogsphere, but the “Googlesphere”. Who can get their opinions ranking higher in Google than your opponents.

Rick E. Bruner’s Business Blog Consulting: Report (PDF): The Power and Politics of Blogs
Daniel W. Drezner, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and Henry Farrell, assistant professor of political science and George Washington University, have posted a new academic paper on blogs:

This paper addresses this puzzle by focusing on two interrelated aspects of the “blogosphere”: the unequal distribution of readers across the array of weblogs, and the increasing interactions between blogs and mainstream media outlets…
The skewed distribution of weblog influence makes it easy for observers to extract information or analysis from blogs–but the reason they are important is that journalists and opinion leaders are readers of blog.