Bloggasm

It’s become well established by now that news aggregators — blogs and social news sites that link to off-site content — have enormous influence. There have been countless articles about the power of Matt Drudge and how his links and headlines drive discussion. There are sites and studies that document which domains that Matt Drudge and social news site Digg link to most often.

But what about Glenn Reynolds’ Instapundit? The site receives on average over half a million page views a day and can send so called “instalaunches,” surges of traffic that result in thousands of new readers via a single link. Many other bloggers and journalists read his site and it’s not uncommon for a linked item to receive wider coverage elsewhere. Though it’s widely known that Reynolds often links to conservative sites, he’s thought of by many to be much closer to the center than most right-wing bloggers (he would probably label himself a libertarian).

I originally set out to document which website domains Reynolds links to most often over a month-long period, but quickly discovered that his website only lets you click backward about three pages before it no longer offers the “previous entries” button. Instead, I had to settle for only four days of data, but even this relatively small data set was fascinating.

Over a period of four days spanning from February 23 to Feb. 26, Reynolds published a total of 287 links to 144 separate domains. In that small space of time, there were 26 domains that he linked to three times or more.

The two domains he linked to most often — Amazon.com (22) and Pajamasmedia.com (19) — aren’t surprising; Amazon has a referral system that allows Reynold to get a cut out of every click-through sale and Pajamas Media hosts his own blog. PJTV.com — also a Pajamas Media outlet — received a high number of links as well.

Of those domains that received three or more links, many of them were right-wing, but a few weren’t, including BoingBoing (9), Autoblog (3), New Scientist (3), Popsci.com (4), Popular Mechanics (4), Slate (3), and others. As is evident from the above list, though many Instapundit links are political in nature, he also often links to non-political stories — usually tech articles.

Below is a breakdown of all the domains Reynolds linked to three times or more:

Amazon.com — 22

weeklystandard.com — 3

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