Light posting today, as I'm paying for my day off yesterday (but yes -- the lettuce, and even the spinach, are in the ground and the fish pond pump is back up and running, so it was a productive day!).I came across an interesting post over at All Spin Zone. Blogger Richard Blair has done an admittedly unscientific study of the site traffic at 5 "A-List" progressive sites over the past month. You will recall that I wrote about my personal decision to stop visiting certain sites where I no longer felt welcome as a Clinton supporter. Well, apparently I was not alone in that decision:
A quick review of the graphics below tell a surprising tale: traffic is down significantly on the pro-Obama sites (30% or more over the past month), but about level on the pro-Clinton and “neutral” sites. What does this mean? I have no friggin’ idea. But the trends are clear and appear to be statistically significant.You can read more and see the graphs here.
AmericaBlog (leans Obama): As the candidate wars have escalated, AmericaBlog has experienced a 40% drop in peak weekly traffic over the past 30 days. From a pure statistical standpoint, both the traffic peaks and valleys are both lower, and consistently so.
Daily Kos (leans Obama): In one month alone, DKos shed nearly 1/2 million unique visitors (on peak traffic days) between the beginning of March and April’s Fool day.
Atrios’ Eschaton (neutral): I’ll give Atrios this: he’s managed to build a nice little empire, and a heck of a stable (traffic-wise) community. Eschaton has taken pains to maintain site neutrality in the candidate wars, even if the community members seem to lean more Obama (but not rabidly so, as is the case on DKos and AmericaBlog). As a result, Eschaton has been able to maintain a relatively flat slope on traffic gains or losses.
Talk Left (leans Clinton): If the Obama-leaning sites have driven off Clinton supporters to other sites, the defection isn’t particularly apparent on the two blogs reviewed that lean toward Clinton. There hasn’t been a significant increase in traffic at Talk Left - but there hasn’t been a decrease, either.
MyDD (leans Clinton): Again, for a self-identified pro-Clinton blog, the traffic at MyDD has remained fairly static at the height of the candidate wars. It’s hard to say if this is because defecting Obama supporters are being offset by an influx of disaffected Clinton backers from other blogs, or if the traffic patterns on MyDD are just “mature”, due to the longevity of the blog.
6 comments:
very interesting statistics. thanks for the insight.
And I don't know what it all means in the end. I just thought it was interesting.
Thanks for picking up the post, Sue. I'm not sure what it all means, either. But I do know that as someone who is heavily invested in a Dem winning the Presidential Idol sweepstakes this year, that the stupid alignments that have taken place are not productive in the least.
I'm actually more concerned about the down ticket races in congress. We need as many seats as we can get. As long as this acrimony continues, it negatively impacts the possibility of getting clear majorities in both the house and senate.
From a purely progressive perspective, I do believe that Clinton is a much stronger candidate than Obama. But that's just me - and I'll keep my site as neutral as possible until we have a nominee.
At that point, I'll support whomever is selected. That's where every Dem / progressive needs to be, IMHO.
Again, thanks for the link! There's been a lot of great discussion.
Regards,
Richard
I think you're absolutely right, Richard. I found your post interesting because of my own experience and from what I have heard anecdotally from others. I support Clinton, but not rabidly so. However when I went to sites such as Americablog and Daily Kos and read some unfair things about her I felt compelled to make a reasonable argument in her defense. The responses from readers there were so juvenile and nasty, I just decided to stop visiting those sites.
Apparently a few other folks did, too. Obama will be better than McCain, of course I know that. It's some of his supporters that I have a problem with. (But let me add that I also know many intelligent, articulate Obama supporters, too! They just don't hang out at those sites, I guess.)
sue j, snce BAC at Yikes decided to delete my post, I thought I'd put it here:
bac, you said women have had the vote for 88 years -- two generations. Wrong.
My grandmother was able to vote with the first women voters. Then my mother, then me, and my oldest. That sounds like four generations of voters.
By the way, my grandmother, who grew up in Iowa, was a graduate of Northwestern University, as was my grandfather. So too were my mother and her two sisters. No brothers in the family.
As for your statistics on business start-ups and failures, well, nice stuff, but meaningless. Not the least of it is the fact that "women-owned" businesses are granted special treatment. Hence, there are many businesses fronted by apparent female owners that are actually male owned. Happens regularly in the construction industry.
Meanwhile, like I stated, there are areas where women rarely, if ever, tread. No major Wall Street women. There are plenty of female analysts. But no major names in the big-time parts of Wall Street are female. It's got nothing to do with gender.
Warren Buffett has succeeded because he's got some kind of rare genius. Other males are in his top percentile of performance. Zero females.
No female chess champions that I know of. I suspect the best bridge players are all male as well. Not that there aren't superb female players, but I think the top rung is all male.
I am an engineering-school graduate. My two finest math professors were female. But only a handful of my classmates were female. That's how it is in engineering.
It's often said that women were discouraged by male teachers from pursuing engineering studies. It's said the men tried to scare them out of the field.
That's nonsense. Everyone going to engineering school is told the same story -- two-thirds will drop engineering before graduation. Since the vast majority of engineering students are male, that means the vast majority of the two-thirds who switch majors will be males.
These days half of all law school students and half of all med school students are female. Hence, the issue of entering those fields has been settled.
But there is no similar influx into engineering. Meanwhile, I'll bet the majority of patents are issued to males. Most certainly technical patents are issued more often to males.
Near the end of your comment you mention that women have been the object of a lot of violence. Yeah. I suppose you're suggesting women face more violence than men. Please. Now you're grasping.
Then you claim men are fucking up the planet. Aha. You mean by building things that allow people to live comfortably. So cars, air conditioners, heaters, and virtually every other device, machine, gizmo and wingding are items taking us down the wrong road of life.
The unfortunate part of your claim is that rather than design an electric-car battery that holds more energy than a gallon of gasoline, you'd rather complain. Why is that?
You mentioned the academic success of the president. As though a president's college grades tell you whether he's going to succeed as the leader of the free world decades after he's gotten his degree.
Truman was the last US president who did not go to college. He faced probably the toughest decisions of any president since Lincoln. Would he have taken a different course if he'd been a student rather than a soldier during WWI?
As for your comments on Halliburton. First, Halliburton has revenue of maybe $30 billion a year. I don't know where you get the idea it's "trillions."
Second, Halliburton is in the oil business. Formerly, Kellog Brown and Root (KBR) was part of Halliburton and it received military contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan. KBR has revenue of less than $15 billion.
You concern yourself with "no-bid" contracts. Okay. But when war is being waged, troops cannot wait for food, fuel, ammunition, and all other supplies. Meanwhile, operating in a combat zone is dangerous. The enemy kills without regard for the status of the target. Civilian truck driver or Marine rifleman, it's all the same. Hence, the civilian truck driver gets a fat paycheck or he goes home.
I have no idea what you mean when you refer to a "lost 12 billion dollars" at Halliburton.
Halliburton is a public company. You can read its financial statements. If $12 billion fell from the sky and landed on its income statement, the world would know. It's far more likely the government is managing its books poorly, and can't account for its own actions. But, so far, nothing suggests anyone did anything except lose track of the accounting. Nothing suggests real money disappeared.
Long story short, there are differences between men and women. Women have babies. Men cannot. That's a crucial difference. Why pretend it stops there?
As for political leadership by women, well, the only time it happens is in democracies.
Yeah, sure, and in monarchies. But who cares about that? There have been no female dictators I can think of. There's something to be learned from that.
As for Hillary vs Obama, well, she's in a tight race because voters are far less impressed than her triumphalist staff predicted several months ago when she was expected to skate to the nomination.
The Democratic nominating process is defined by gender vs race. Who knew it would come to this when the game began several months ago?
You suggested Bush got into office by way of a network of powerful people. How did Hillary get to her current place? Same way.
I have no idea what you mean when you suggest a politician "earned" his position. The voters speak. That's it.
Marion Barry was elected and re-elected. What does that tell you? then again, I live in the congressional district that was created for Shirley Chisholm.
Her latest successor, Yvette Clarke, lied to voters and said she was a college graduate. But she isn't. The truth came out during last Congressional election. Nevertheless, after lying through her teeth about college graudation, voters elected her. What does that tell you?\
Anyway, Hillary is in a tight race because of she is a white female running against a black male. Her chief appeal in the primary race is her gender. But it will become a liability in the general election.
However, many voters already have Clinton-fatigue. Others can't take any more of her silly stories. Gore got into the same mess when he told people about an old woman who was eating dog food to get by on her Social Security check. But he made the mistake of talking about a living person. The son of the old lady went public with the facts and Gore looked like an idiot.
Hillary seems to have missed that lesson.
Obama's chief appeal is his race. But it too will become a liability in the general election. If he's nominated, it will take mere minutes before he's plastered as a black candidate out to win reparations for blacks. When whites see him as a president who might hit them with the biggest wealth transfer in history he'll lose like he's running against George Washington himself.
odds-maker, perhaps if you didn't leave such long, ranting, and completely ridiculous comments, bloggers wouldn't delete you.
I suggest you start your own blog to spout your inane thoughts. You list way too many falsehoods about -- and downright insults to -- women, blacks, and any intelligent person of any race or gender for me to refute them one by one. But good luck with your own blog. I'm sure you'll get lots of traffic there.
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