In the final hours of election eve, I decided to run a quick search of the top blogs that have discussed the election and the presidential and vice presidential candidates during the past week in our BuzzMetrics data system (which includes about 80 million blogs). With articles on many major news and marketing sites, I thought it would be particularly interesting to check out where the blog discussion is occurring.

To that end, I conducted three separate searches:

First, I searched the term “election” and linked it with the names of the four major candidates (Republican and Democrat). Interestingly, Huffingtonpost.com, columnist Arianna Huffington’s generalist blog with a noted leftist lean, came out on top, with more than 40% of the total messages (among the top 15 blogs, ranked by number of messages about the topic). Following HuffPo was Dailykos.com, a political blog that claims 2-4 million daily visits, with about 13% of discussion within total messages (among the top 15 blogs). I did a quick profile of each of the top 15 blogs to see if they self-identified with a political preference, and among them, seven identify as liberal, whereas six identify as conservative. Two of the blogs did not identify a preference, Jossip.com and Politicalwire.com.

The second search I conducted was the term “election” along with the Democratic candidates, Obama and Biden. HuffPo again ranked first, with more than 40% of discussion, and Dailykos.com again ranked second, with about 10%. While the following 13 blogs shifted position, the same sites top the list overall. And again, after scanning through each blog on the list, seven identify as liberal, six identify as conservative, and two did not identify a preference.

When I ran the third search, (”election” and the Republican candidates, McCain and Palin) I wasn’t sure what would happen. Sure enough, however, the results were similar. Once again, Huffingtonpost.com has the highest volume of discussion with about 45%, Dailykos.com claims about 10% of discussion, and the following 13 blogs are almost all same as in the previous two searches, (seven liberal, six conservative, and two without identification).

So what does this mean? For me, some of the key takeaways are as follows:

• More self-identified “liberal” sites rank in the top 15 than “conservative” ones, though the numbers are pretty evenly split, with 7 liberal sites for each of the three searches, and 6 conservative sites for each of the three searches.
• Popular political blog Drudgereport.com is not on the list, and neither is Gawker.com, a Jossip.com competitor.
• Despite the search terms, the same list appears (though in different order) - apparently the candidates and political affiliation matter less than the discussion of the election in general.
• If online advertising is such a game changer this year (and, I assume, in years to follow), advertisers should note that both liberal and conservative bloggers are posting actively and to a similar degree - and neither should be overlooked.