Visualizing Memeorandum

Memeorandum is a really cool blog aggregator, so cool, in fact, I wonder if blogging would be as fun without it.

Yet lately I've been seeing left-wing blogs getting a preponderance of attention, especially on the "featured posts" sidebar. With the exception of Hot Air, the featured links have been to pro-Obama lefties overwhelmingly - and over and over again. It's seemed so bad I was thinking folks like the nihilist Newshoggers were paying kickbacks for the traffic.

Well, it turns out that waxy.org's got a cool study posted, graphically indicating the political biases found at Memeorandum (but not necessarily of Memeorandum):

Like the rest of the world, I've been completely obsessed with the presidential election and nonstop news coverage. My drug of choice? Gabe Rivera's Memeorandum, the political sister site of Techmeme, which constantly surfaces the most controversial stories being discussed by political bloggers.

While most political blogs are extremely partisan, their biases aren't immediately obvious to outsiders like me. I wanted to see, at a glance, how conservative or liberal the blogs were without clicking through to every article.

With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases.

Waxy notes that the model measures linking patterns, not necessarily political bias:

The colors don't necessarily represent each blogger's personal views or biases. It's a reflection of their linking activity. The algorithm looks at the stories that blogger's linked to before, relative to all other bloggers, and groups them accordingly. People that link to things that only conservatives find interesting will be classified as bright red, even if they are personally moderate or liberal, and vice-versa. The algorithm can't read minds, so don't be offended if you feel misrepresented. It's only looking at the data.

The tech mechanics of their model are pretty accurate in any case, as we can see the ideological identification of the blogs highlighted as realistic. American Power is highlighted in light red in the screen-shot above, so that's kind of cool to be captured in all of this hypothesizing.

Note how on the Brooks piece at top, lefty blogs hammered the point like blood-sucking vampires; meanwhile, conservatives took after the Obama socialist documents piece like a pack of hungry wolves. That's the way it is in the political blogosphere, as I noted previously.

Waxy's got script for download availble, to highlight partisan colors in individual browsers.

But my suggestion is for political bloggers to take advantage of Memeorandum itself, reading and linking to it aggressively when writing.

That's how aspiring political commentators will get their stuff noticed - you'll be a "playa"!