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.

Tags: blog, mccain, obama

I’ve been working on a couple projects lately that have me thinking about CGM and its relationship to overall media. Specifically, I’ve been trying to get my head around a taxonomy of online media. This is no easy task. The challenge here is two-fold: First, online media changes so darn quickly, that any construct you create needs to be flexible enough to change with the times; and second, any construct you build is likely to be disputed by just about everyone else who develops Internet research. And, no I haven’t figured this all out, but the process did lead me down a path.

To start thinking about this problem I thought about CGM and what makes it different from “mainstream” online media. This is a bit complicated on its own since CGM is not one thing; it is made up of blogs, discussion boards, video and, some would argue, chat. It seems to me that the unifying factor here is, shockingly enough, the consumer.

After having this not so brilliant insight, I thought about the blogs I read most days – BoingBoing, DeadSpin, Gothamist, Gizmodo, RazzBall, Freakonomics, Diane Mermigas: On Media and Online Travel Review. In at least six of these cases (BoingBoing, DeadSpin, Gothamist, Gizmodo, Diane Mermigas: On Media, Feakonomics), the writers of the blogs are not consumers, they are professional writers. Writing these blogs either makes up some part of their income, or is part of their broader work, much as this blog is for me.

With this said what happens to this construct of CGM, when the consumer is not in the middle, when it is a professional writer? What is the unifying factor? The frequency of updates? The platform itself? The tone? The format?

I then began to think about one of my favorite sports writers, ESPN’s Bill Simmons. For us Boston sports fans, Bill is a bit of an icon. He started writing a very blog-like column on his own site bostonsportsguy.com long before there was something called blogs – but it definitely had the “blog” tone, and it too was updated frequently. Bill’s column for ESPN.com and ESPN the magazine retains these qualities, particularly that of tone. Few people, however, would call him a “blogger” per se.

This thought process led me to the idea that blogs are subset of CGM is a fallacy. To understand what I mean, see the graphic below:

From a stylistic standpoint, one could make an argument that a blog is in all four quadrants above. One could also argue, however, that the concept of “consumer” implies amateur status and mainstream media sites do not employ amateurs (if they were employed, they would no longer be amateurs). If you use this construct to think about blogs, only a specific percent of blogs are truly CGM, specifically those that fall in the lower right hand corner.

Other than this being an academic exercise that bores the pants off people at cocktail parties, why is this important?

Two of the chief topics of concern in the CGM space are the following questions:

-How do we monetize CGM?

-How do we measure CGM?

These questions are too big, and too broad to answer. Breaking apart the construct of what is CGM, and what is a blog allows us to focus the questions and get closer to an answer. The fact is, we pretty much know how to monetize and how to measure all of the quadrants other than the lower right. So the problem isn’t how do we measure and monetize CGM, the problem is, how do we measure and monetize small, fragmented, amateur websites. This becomes a problem we can begin to think about solving – and frankly becomes much more of a long-tail question than a CGM question.

Ad networks anyone?

This is clearly a work in progress, and one could argue with pretty much all of my assumptions. I would love some help refining the concept. If you have any thoughts please shoot me a note or post in the comments section.

Tags: blog, cgm, online advertising