Bloggasm

Liberal blogs saw an 18% increase in traffic this week compared to last week while conservative blogs saw an increase of 16%.

The survey of 10 liberal blogs and 10 conservative blogs found that liberal blogs experienced an increase of 1,634,933 page views this week and conservative blogs showed an increase of 1,761,430. The increase in part could be due to reported heavy internet traffic during the presidential inauguration.

For consistency, only blogs that openly displayed their traffic statistics through Sitemeter were surveyed. The number of page views does not represent the number of unique visitors to a site, but rather the number of times a page was loaded.

Althouse.blogspot.com saw the sharpest increase, with 37%. Gatewaypundit.blogspot.com was the only blog that saw a decrease in traffic, with a drop of 5%.

Complete traffic stats below:

Liberal Blogs:

http://dailykos.com/

last week: 5,552,953
this week: 6,640,874
Change: An increase of 1,087,921, or 20%6

http://crooksandliars.com/

last week: 1,268,953
this week: 1,370,516
Change: An increase of 101,563, or 7%

http://firedoglake.com

last week 628,761
this week: 741,328
Change: An increase of 112,567, or 18%

http://www.eschatonblog.com

last week: 524,818
this week: 574,641
Change: An increase of 49,823, or 9%

http://americablog.blogspot.com/

last week: 390,950
this week: 445,725
Change: An increase of 54,775, or 14%

http://washingtonmonthly.com/

last week: 341,747
this week: 442,442
Change: An increase of 100,695, or 29%

http://www.mydd.com/

last week: 176,932
this week: 199,731
Change: An increase of 22,799, or 13%

http://www.talkleft.com/

last week: 188,384
this week: 235,284
Change: An increase of 46,900, or 25%

http://openleft.com/

last week: 158,550
this week: 187,908
Change: An increase of 29,358, or 19%

http://www.sadlyno.com/

last week: 104,412
this week: 132,944
Change: An increase of 28,532, or 27%

Total last week: 9,336,460
Total This week: 10,971,393
Change: An increase of 1,634,933, or 18%

***

Conservative Blogs:

http://hotair.com/

last week: 3,567,088
this week: 4,252,906
Change: An increase of 685,818, or 20%

http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/

last week: 2,408,938
this week: 2,577,372
Change: An increase of 168,434, or 7%

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

last week: 1,380,442
this week: 1,670,823
Change: An increase of 290,381, or 21%

http://michellemalkin.com/

last week: 1,937,467
this week: 2,232,251
Change: An increase of 294,784, or 15%

http://www.ace.mu.nu/

last week: 535,585
this week: 650,258
Change: An increase of 114,673, or 21%

http://www.redstate.com/

last week: 451,878
this week: 543,431
Change: An increase of 91,553, or 20%

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/

last week: 275,583
this week: 261,191
Change: A decrease of 14,392, or 5%

http://althouse.blogspot.com/

last week: 256,984
this week: 351,316
Change: An increase of 94,332, or 37%

http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/blog

last week: 181,104
this week: 209,440
Change: An increase of 28,336, or 16%

http://patterico.com/

last week: 84,175
this week: 91,686
Change: An increase of 7,511, or 9%

Total last week: 11,079,244
Total this week: 12,840,674
Change: An increase of 1,761,430, or 16%

from xkcd

Be Ira Glass!

Are you ready to take your hipster nerdom into the highest echelons? Then try assembling these glasses, and wearing them while listening to your This American Life podcast! (Yes, it does require taking your other pair of black-rimmed glasses off first.)

There’s a full-res version under “All Sizes” above, in case you truly actually want to do this.

Also, if you’re not a very big fan of This American Life, I suppose you can just scribble out Ira Glass and write “Woody Allen” and watch Annie Hall instead.

Finally. One of my biggest critiques for 99% of newspaper websites is that you still need to go through a human being to advertise on them. That’s why blog advertising network BlogAds is so brilliant; for years it’s allowed anyone to go in, create his or her own ad, and pay a base price. All without having to deal with a single person. This cuts down on extra costs needed to hire ad people when they’re not always necessarily needed, and it’s inviting to smaller online businesses that might be overlooked by an advertising team.

I’m not sure how long the New York Times has offered this feature, but I just noticed it for the first time today. Unsurprisingly, a company that normally advertises on blogs snagged an ad on nytimes.com:

It’s been awhile since I’ve mentioned here that you can follow me on Twitter. I’m lucky if I can post five times a week here but on Twitter I’m tweeting stuff several times of day, and a lot of my tweets are links to media-related content that I often blog about here.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m once again using blog search engine Technorati just as often as I use Google Blog Search. I have to because for many types of searches Google continues to deliver mountains of irrelevant results.

Back in December I interviewed representatives from both Google and Technorati for a PBS article about the blog search engine wars. I asked the Google spokesperson about its problems with indexing irrelevant sidebar content on blogs, and he assured me that Google would be working on this problem in the new year.

But that still doesn’t answer the question: Why do you need to index sidebar information in the first place? When I’m doing a blog search, I am almost always looking for content that shows up in the body of a post. I am never looking for something in the blog roll, or on the side feeds, or even stuff in the comments section. What on earth convinced Google that its users were looking for this stuff? These are the problems that plagued Technorati two years ago — problems that have been largely fixed, though not completely — so why is Google repeating the mistake?

Google Blog Search was almost perfect before they went and changed it. I had almost no complaints. Now they’ve gone and ruined a great product and are being stubborn by blowing off all the criticism.

It’s always humorous when a conservative tries his hand at a film review, mostly because of how adept conservatives usually are at ignoring all artistry and filmmaking techniques at the expense of their political ideology. Like the mainstream media, academia, and just about any other intellectual institution, a conservative can only address films through his paranoid ideological victimhood lens, either lambasting the film for its left-leaning story line or noting that it’s “one of the few” Hollywood films to favor conservative politics. Mike Riggs addressed this issue in a post titled, “Why Conservatives Suck at Culture Criticism.”

Another problem, and one that is tied closely to the point above, is that conservatives insist on defining their work as Conservative, and thus write about culture, art, and entertainment only insofar as each pertains to their politics.

In fact conservative criticism suckitude is so predictable that I was able to guess the contents of this post at conservative site Hot Air before I even opened it up: Gran Torino, Dark Knight shut out at the Oscars

Likewise, the shutout of Gran Torino does not surprise me. The politics of the movie run counter to Hollywood’s taste for the most part, although the theme of the futility of vigilante justice should have gained it some notice. I think Gran Torino is easily a better movie than Button, and for that matter, so is Doubt. Both have more conflict, more drama, and more reality than the elegiac Button. The only conclusion I can reach is that Oscar voters didn’t get it, and got too hung up on the rough edges of Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski. Either that, or they were too busy fawning over the politics of Frost/Nixon and Milk to notice.

It’s victimhood, plain and simple. Never mind Eastwood’s previous Oscar wins, Hot Air wouldn’t let a little thing like that get in the way of its confirmation bias.