Bloggers compelled Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority leader and Dan Rather to apologize to viewers on national television. But can these online diarists influence global politics as well? What began as a hobby is evolving into a new medium that is changing the information-gathering landscape for international journalists and policymakers alike.

Go check it out -- critiques have already been posted elsewhere in the blogosphere. Oh, and if your blog was not mentioned in the "Around The World in Blogs" section, don't blame us, blame the staff at FP!! [Forget world politics -- did blogs influence the 2004 election?--ed.] Hey, I'm glad you asked -- I'll be on a panel to answer that very question in a few weeks:

DID BLOGS TIP ELECTION 2004? IHS and Reason magazine present Ana Marie Cox, Daniel Drezner, Henry Farrell, and Michael Tomasky debating the role of blogs in the election on November 18. WHAT: A free-for-all discussion on the role of blogs and politics featuring Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, blogger and University of Chicago political scientist Daniel Drezner, blogger and George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell, The American Prospect's Michael Tomasky, moderated by Reason's Nick Gillespie. Drinks and hors d'oeuvres to follow remarks and Q&A. WHEN: Thursday, November 18 7:30-9:00 pm WHERE: Topaz Bar 1733 N Street NW, Washignton, DC ***NEW LOCATION*** Porter's Dining Saloon 1207 19th St. NW (19th and M Street) Washington, DC This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies and Reason. Space is limited, so please reserve a place by RSVPing to Alina Stefanescu at astefane-at-gmu.edu. Free drink tickets will be given to the first 50 respondents!

Jimmy Orr, the White House's Internet guru, wants the White House Web site to get bloggier. "We're trying to make it more bloggish," he says in an interview. "People need to see that we're on the site and we're listening to what they have to say." So, he says: "We're going to try -- as questions come in, and as people have comments about the events of the day -- to be more proactive." Blogs -- short for Web logs -- are all the rage these days. And while some people use them for such things as chronicling their sex lives, they have more significantly emerged as a potent vehicle for news and views on the Internet. Two of the most seminal features of blogs are interaction with readers and immediacy. And the White House Web site under Orr, an enthusiastic 37-year-old press office staffer, has already taken some steps in that direction. White House Interactive is generally updated daily with a new e-mail question from the public and an answer, typically from someone fairly high up in the White House staff.... A while back, Orr was his own guest on "Ask the White House" One questioner raised the topic of blogging. And it turns out Orr's a fan. "Bloggers are very instrumental. They are important. They can lead the news. And they've been underestimated," he wrote. "Here's what the bloggers do. They notice something in the news or something they've observed that maybe the 'traditional' media hasn't covered or isn't spending much time on. But they think it is significant. So, they give the story a second life (or first). And they talk about it. And others talk about it. Before you know it, it is leading the news." In his online appearance, Orr mentioned a few blogs he reads regularly. He e-mailed me a more extensive list: • The Note, from ABC News • Noted Now, also from ABC News • Andrew Sullivan • Instapundit • OpinionJournal.com's Best of the Web Today • HyperGeneMediaBlog • White House Briefing (You're reading it.) • James Lileks And he's not the only one in the White House who reads blogs, he says. Far from it. "They're important here," he says. "I can tell you that a lot of people read them." Note to White House officials (and others): Don't forget to nominate your favorites for washingtonpost.com's 2004 Best Blogs - Politics and Elections Readers' Choice Awards.

Bloggers are rightly accused of excessive navel-gazing, and according to the Washington Times' Chris Baker, blogs "have been the domain primarily of amateur political pundits, conspiracy theorists and pseudo-experts on any number of topics." Still, it is worth observing that both Orr's analysis of blogs -- as well as his reading preferences -- seem to buttress the arguments made in our blog paper. [Hey, what about that WaPo contest?--ed. Readers should feel free to knock themselves out.]

Dan Drezner linked to the poll that shows which blogs are read by the media. Guess what, again? That's right. Top ten - no women. "Elite" responses - no women. One woman (Amanda Butler) was thanked for "collecting and collating the data while displaying the utmost discretion." Women are valued for ... their secretarial skills.... This discussion comes up approximately every three months. Rivka at Respectful of Otters just wrote about it. I last wrote about it in March. Nothing changes. A male blogger (this time Matt Yglesias) asks where are the women interested in politics, or asks where are the women bloggers? We see more media articles that completely ignore the contributions of the large number of female bloggers out there. The guys inevitably say "mea culpa," but go back to business as usual. Rinse and repeat. We are half the population, and we are nearly half of the blogosphere. We do not deserve to be ignored.

I posted a brief comment to her blog about why I hired Amanda ("[S]he was one of the best students in an undergraduate class I had previously taught. She was assigned tasks that any undergraduate RA would have been assigned. Gender was not a factor in the division of labor.") UPDATE: click here for Butler's response to Wilson. Here is Wilson's response:

So the survey is flawed. Your methodology should have taken self-selection into consideration. It's another survey that takes into account only the people who choose to link to it, thereby losing sight of many worthwhile blogs. Not only that, you'll end up with a very narrow view of both the definition of political discourse and the nature of the blogosphere. The same small number of top tier bloggers get the usual publicity, and alternate voices with other points of view are lost. Surveys like that one make it seem as if the blogosphere is primarily composed of men, when that is most definitely not the case. Survey's like that also narrowly define politics, which is much less two dimensional than that handful of topics most frequently discussed on blogs (Bush, Kerry, Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Israel, etc.) Women's political voices are being ignored again. I simply find it annoying after all this time. After all the repeated waving to the top tier bloggers that we are here, nothing changes. Women bloggers, especially women political bloggers, continue to be ignored by the high rankers of the blogosphere and by the media, and when we don't make a survey, we are blamed for not linking to it. The problem isn't with the women bloggers. The problem isn't with alternative points of view. The problem lies with the survey.

Another female blogger echoes this sentiment:

[I]t's a Male thing. They hang in packs. They don't think about women. It's in their nature to ignore or forget us. In short, what's new? So I am not surprised.

Another blogger who goes by Pinko Feminist Hellcat concurred: "Men simply don't see us. And when we talk about anything besides politics, we are 'journalers'."

A few thoughts: 1) Hell yes, the survey is flawed. All surveys are flawed. I was quite blunt in outlining the flaws in the post, so I'm not sure where Wilson thinks I'm saying this is the perfect source of data. 2) Disturbingly, the only other time I blogged about gender and blogs in the past was... er... about three months ago. 3) Wilson has a valid point in saying that "the same small number of top tier bloggers get[ting] the usual publicity." This was one of the core hypotheses underlying the paper Henry Farrell and I are co-authoring -- in terms of both links and traffic, blogs display a power law distribution (See Clay Shirky for the data to support this assertion). As a result, the top blogs absorb the lion's share of attention. The media survey supports this conjecture. This means is that it's tough for anyone to crack the top tier of blogs -- regardless of gender. 4) Wilson seems to think the results are skewed because there is a narrow definition of "political" blogs. Here's the thing, though -- my survey didn't ask for the respondent's favorite political blogs -- just their favorite ones. Maybe the respondents have an equally narrow definition of politics, but it was not conditioned by the survey question. 5) The feminist critique did make me wonder if there was any significant difference in the female responses in contrast to the overall response. So I went back to the data to see if there was any appreciable difference in response by gender. Here are the top 10 favorite blogs of the women who responded:

1. Instapundit -- 10 2. Sullivan -- 9 3. NRO's The Corner -- 6 4. Drezner, Romenesko -- tied with 3 6. Gawker, How Appealing, Talking Points Memo, LA Observed, Volokh -- tied with 2.

There are a few changes -- Kaus disappears entirely, and Sullivan falls from first to second - but names on this list look awfully familiar. 6) Finally, Wilson seems to be confusing normative and positive analysis. In her post, she's simultaneously upset about two facts: a) feminist blogs are being ignored by the mainstream media; b) I posted survey results suggesting that feminist blogs are being ignored by the mainstream media. I can understand her normative disapproval with the first point (though I respectfully disagree with the extent and source of the problem). I'm a bit flummoxed by her reaction to the second point, which is intended to describe the way the world is, not the way it ought to be. Don't blame the messenger. To be fair, Wilson herself the proprietor of Feministe says elsewhere that "this media, by nature, begs to be written with exaggeration and embellishment," so maybe I'm exaggerating the feminist state of pique. Then again, she (that is, Feministe's proprietor) also says elsewhere that, "if you're conservative, faint of heart, anti-feminist, homophobic, racist, use bad grammar, and/or detest typos, you will not like what i have to say. feel free to leave." So maybe I'm not exaggerating. UPDATE: Just for the record, my take on the tenor of most of the comments to this post is akin to Ezra: "I've never seen a bunch of commentors so totally destroy their argument by embodying that which they're denying."

[M]ost bloggers who write about political subjects cannot avoid addressing (and, more importantly, linking to) arguments made by people with different views. The reason is that much of the blogosphere is devoted to criticizing what other people have to say. It's hard to argue with what the folks at National Review Online or Salon are saying unless you go read their articles, and, in writing a post about them, you will almost always either quote or link to the article, or both. Ditto for people who criticize Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, or Kos, or Atrios. If you don't like what Glenn said about Iraq, you quote a bit of his posting, link to it, and then make fun of him. These links are the most important way that people travel on the Web from one view to its opposite. (And linking also produces a good check on criticism because you can actually go and read what the person being criticized has said.).... Nevertheless, one might object, this argument is premised on the idea that the blogosphere has customs of linking that encourage give and take. What is to guarantee that these customs will continue? Obviously bloggers could give up their customs, and stop linking to each other. But I doubt this will happen; the customs make sense given the way the technology works. And worrying about whether people will or won't continue to link absent a government regulatory apparatus that encourages linking completely misses the point about how Internet speech works: The fact that these customs developed says a lot about the health and vibrancy and pluralism of the public sphere in cyberspace.

In his second post on the topic, Balkin then goes on to effectively critique the Sunday New York Times article on cyberbalkanization that I linked to here. Balkin's posts are so good that Henry Farrell and I will have to cite him in our own blog paper -- as we're making many of the same arguments.

Glenn is so successful because he understands the idea of blogs as portals. (This is my view, not Glenn's own self-description.) Blogs that offer too much of the author, and the author alone, are vulnerable to other blogs that cream-skim them, and other blogs, thereby offering the superior product. The question is not who can write the best stuff, but who can collect the best stuff, and comment on it most effectively. Really smart people are not always used to these terms of competition, I might add. The future of blogging lies in the hands of those who recognize the intellectual and literary division of labor. (emphasis in original) The greater the number of blogs, the greater the importance of "portal blogs," such as Glenn's.

This has prompted a fair amount of angry reaction in the blogosphere. Will Baude summarizes the objections nicely:

Pardon, but an RSS feed can do that. The reason I don't read Instapundit is that I don't particularly agree with Glenn Reynolds about what's wheat and what's chaff.... Sure, there's a place for aggregator blogs like Instapundit (or more critically How Appealling). But if you're trying to make your way in the blogosphere, it's better to offer an occasional portal to the truly obscure and a lot of original, sound, and hard-hitting analysis.

The problem with this debate is that it's not an "either-or" situation. A while back I wrote that there were two types of blogs:

First, some blogs can act as focal points for information provision. Now, by definition, there can only be one or two focal points. Glenn Reynolds generally acts as one for bloggers. During concentrated crises -- Josh Marshall in the case of Trent Lott's downfall, or Kelley for Operation Iraqi Freedom -- others can spring up. These blogs serve the useful purpose of collecting and distributing already available information to interested readers. In doing so, these individuals help to frame and propel debates of the day. They also reduce search costs for the rest of us.... Second, most bloggers provide value added in the form of criticism and commentary. We don't generate new facts so much as put already existing facts into a larger framework. We then look at other people who do this and comment and critique their efforts. This is my comparative advantage, at least.

A glance at the Blogosphere Ecosystem suggests this division of labor is more stable than Cowen's post suggests. Consider the top ten blogs:

1. Instapundit 2. Eschaton (Atrios) 3. Talking Points Memo 4. Daily Kos / Political State Report 5. The Truth Laid Bear 6. Andrew Sullivan 7. Little Green Footballs 8. CalPundit 9. USS Clueless 10. The Volokh Conspiracy

I'd characterize five of these blogs (Instapundit, Atrios, Daily Kos, N.Z. Bear, and LGF) as primarily portals or focal points. The other five (Marshall, Sullivan, Drum, Den Beste, and Volokh) are more commentary than portal. [C'mon, Atrios and Glenn offer commentary!--ed. Yes, but I'm using a simple dichotomy. Drudge would be an example of the perfect portal, but beyond him most blogs have a mix of links and commentary.] Given that by definition one would predict portal blogs to be clustered among the top ten, it looks like commentary blogs aren't going anywhere. If you think about, this makes sense, and like most divisions of labor improves the productivity of both sides. Without commentary blogs, there would be less of a demand for the skills required to be a portal blog. Without portals, those specializing in commentary would face higher search costs in developing their topics and arguments. Baude is also correct that newcomers to the blogosphere will have to go the commentary route. For example, here's a new blog that's worth checking out, especially for Californians. I particularly like this post critiquing Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

1) How many blogs do you read a day? 2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if they read less than three?--ed. Then just name the ones you do read.] 3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis? 4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example? 5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all? Why?

Thank you!! UPDATE: In the first 24 hours, I've already received 50 relevant responses. Many thanks to everyone who linked to the request, particularly Glenn Reynolds, Kevin Drum, Cory Doctorow, Howard Bashman, James Joyner, Josh Chafetz, Scripting News, and Jim Romenesko. ANOTHER UPDATE: We're almost at the 100 mark! If you fit the criteria and haven't responded yet, please do so!! Pretty please!! *Do NOT post your answers in the comment box below. It's been disabled for this post -- because otherwise, your answers would be available for all the world to read!!