Blog Traffic As A Reverse Bell Curve (Kind Of) at Blog P.I.

The comments to the Hotline On Call post that started the McCain/Mele Melee (feel free to borrow this phrase!) calls to mind, though doesn’t perfectly illustrate, a truism not just of politics but of the blogosphere in particular: Centrists are loved by no one, not even fellow centrists.

Originally, the post mistakenly identified Reynolds as “center-left.” Verbatim down to the formatting, reader Kathleen complained:

Glenn Reynolds as a center left blogger?! you have got to be freaking joking.

And so it was corrected — but a few hours later Not Marc (possibly referring to post co-author Marc Ambinder, perhaps even a handle of the Not Larry Sabato variety) disagreed with the updated descriptor:

Instapundit is not ‘center-right’. He’s hard right. Do the research: his front page regularly links to sites containing the most rabid, racist crap imaginable.

Here at Blog P.I., we have cast aspersions on the oft-proctored renounce-your-allies tests employed by the left and right, and this is a typical case; Reynolds points readers to Little Green Footballs, but that shouldn’t constitute an endorsement of LGF’s commenters. This kind of guilt-by-association has unfairly dinged the man behind Big Orange, and Reynolds has said before this is one reason why he doesn’t have a comment section of his own — and singled out the Lizardoids as a specific example. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t even self-identify as conservative, but in much of the blogosphere, it really doesn’t matter what you call yourself. (Many of Reynolds’ own fans even dispute his non-conservatism.) And if you do describe yourself as “center” anything, you’re more likely to get burned at both ends.

I’d also wager that even moderates are more likely to criticize fellow moderates, because their independence in part defines them, and their particular issues are also different. Centrist is not a definite category like Left or Right; it’s a None of the Above or Other. And overall, there are fewer moderates driving big traffic compared to their more ideological (or more easily-pegged) peers.

If you lined up a sample of blogs according to ideology along a left-right axis, I predict you’d find something resembling an inverse bell curve — though traffic would drop off again as one approaches either fringe. On the other hand: While the high traffic sites are found closer to the edges, if the center of this curve describes an amalgam of different philosophies, a long-tail effect would flatten the curve, maybe a little, maybe a lot. So it could be a fat upside-down bell, if that makes any sense.

All of which presumes, of course, that one could even agree on how to classify individual blogs as lefterer and righterer (these should be real words) compared to their peers. Which raises too many questions for this post, and cries out for the sort of levity provided by Fred, also in the Hotline’s comments: