It's a debate that sometimes sparks up: assuming blogs are powerful, is it because of their numbers or their influence? Put another way, is it because the right people read them or because enough people read them? I've always figured it's a bit of both, but Matt Continetti argues otherwise:
Inside Crashing the Gate, Armstrong and Moulitsas write that the top liberal blogs grow at a geometric rate, and that, "by late November 2005, the top seventy or so liberal blogs, led by Daily Kos, garnered about 60 million page-views every month." In Blog, his book on the phenomenon, the right-wing blogger Hugh Hewitt writes that "Kos gets 1.6 million--that's million--visitors a month."
For blogs, those are large numbers. For politics, however, they are small. Assuming there are 1 million regular readers of Daily Kos throughout America, that is still only 1/280th of the population--and only 1/59th of the number of people who voted for John Kerry in the last election. It is a tiny fraction of the American electorate.
True enough. On the other hand, Chris Bowers over at MyDD points out some Nielsen numbers which argue DailyKos is averaging nearly 5 million unique visitors a month, rendering it more populous than Iowa and New Hampshire combined. The problem here is that absolute numbers are meaningless. DailyKos remains less than 1/50th of John Kerry's vote total, but is larger than the two most powerful primary states. It's a tiny fraction of China's population, but huge when compared to the total number of folks who donate money or participate actively in American elections. They're tiny compared to sand in the sea and stars in the sky, but incalculably enormous when viewed as a proportion of captured leprechauns.
The question with the Kossacks is what their numbers create, not what they equal out to. If none of them donate money, if the blog doesn't generate hype, or if they all decide to focus on evolutionary theory, their power will be erased. But so long as each Kossack is more involved, active, and determined than the average voter, their 5 million can become far more -- at least, that is, until the ballots are counted. And that's where Continetti gets it right: a lot of Kossacks is not the same things as a lot of voters; and despite their best efforts, they've yet to figure out how to pull off that bit of alchemy.
