Tree of Knowledge

It’d be interesting to have a read of a copy of Colin McLeod’s presentation at last week’s Media Alliance Public Affairs convention mentioned today by Trevor Cook and Jason Wilson.

It sounds like a blogosphere mapping exercise analysing incoming/outgoing links during the last federal election. It ultimately comes to the conclusion that Larvatus Prodeo was the most influential blog in Australia.

I think it’s fair to say that incoming/outgoing links is a reasonable proxy of influence within the blogosphere. But does that equate to influence in the political sphere? At this stage of the development of the Australian blogosphere I’d be looking for some additional evidence eg survey data or traffic details of the number of readers of particular blogs amongst mainstream journalists/political actors.

For the foreseeable future the MSM is going to be a more politically influential medium in the Australian political debate than the blogosphere. In this context, if you’re trying to measure the broader influence of the blogosphere you’d be more interested in their ability to influence the press gallery and political actors. There’s a reasonable body of literature looking at this in the US (see Daniel Drezner for one eg here) but I haven’t heard of any research like this being done in Australia.

So who would be the most politically influential blog in Australia under this measure? Well I can think of one blogger who has a story running on the front page of a number of major newspapers at present….

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