Quite often, I head to memeorandum, hoping to find the news from the traditional media or from bloglandia. Their site purports to feature political web sites that are important, popular and fresh. The implication is that they automatically report and link to whatever is hot at the moment in political blogs.
Yet the blogs to which they link are overwhelmingly right-wing. Over the last couple of weeks I have randomly recorded the blogs that they have linked to in a portion of their site entitled "More Items." There is no particular reason why I selected this sub-section, located at the lower left part of their "front page," to analyze. I chose it at random because I could not examine all of their links. I know of no reason why this sub-section of their site would not be representative of their site as a whole.
I captured and saved ten different of these sub-sections; again chosen at quite random moments. Over the two week period the minimum amount of time between the "captures" was about four hours, and the maximum was about six days. The most recent was this afternoon.
This afternoon I also noted the 50 most "popular" blogs at Technorati. Of course, many were not political. Within that sample, I found five blogs that I would classify as leaning to the left, and only four with a right slant. (#5 Daily Kos,#6 Huffington,#16 Crooks & Liars, #22 Think Progress, #34 Talking Points Memo; versus #9 Instapundit, #12 Michelle M., # 38 L.G.F., and #45 Powerline.) The left ones had a total of 143,365 links from 35,249 sites. The right leaning blogs had 99,902 links from 22,561 sites.
It is no longer true that the right-wingers dominate bloglandia; but still the number of links at memeorandum fails to reflect this reality.
In those ten "captures" there were 106 links to right-wing sites, and only 52 to left leaning blogs. There was a tie in one of the "captures" between the number of links to the left and those to the right; of the other 9 there were two incidents when there were more links to lefties, and 7 where there were more links to righties.
The left is more active, with more hits and more links, than is the right in the world of blogs. But news sites such as memeorandum would have us believe otherwise.
Does this mistake lie in their metrics or in their bias?
UPDATE: Corrected for sloppy spelling, editing, and categorization. (5/9/06)
