Matt Gunterman June 1st, 2007

With the recent announcement by Mark Nickolas of his departure from Kentucky and undetermined future for Bluegrass Report, it got a lot of us in the lefty blogosphere thinking about what’s next for the movement that Nickolas helped spur in the commonwealth. How do we keep the momentum going? We’ve got some ideas there, and we’ll discuss them here in the near future.

First, however, we thought it was important for us to have some sort of snapshot of where the entire Kentucky political blogosphere — both left and right — stands today.

You might think the obvious way to do that would be to graph the traffic that each blog gets, but traffic can be measured in many different ways. And not all blogs make their stats public, and not all the stats that are made public can be compared one to another: “visits” aren’t the same as “unique visits,” which aren’t the same as “page views,” etc.

So, we came up with a simple little way to quantify a Kentucky political blog’s “gravitas”. We decided to take the “Google PageRank” (definition here; calculator here) of each blog and multiply that number by the Technorati “Authority” index of each blog (http://www.technorati.com).

For the sake of keeping the compilation of the graph below manageable, we decided to set the cut off point for inclusion of a blog at PageRank 4. To give you a sense of PageRank scale: Drudge Report and DailyKos are both 7’s; Bluegrass Report is a 6; Bluegrass Roots & CliffSchecter.com are 5’s; Polwatchers, Ditch Mitch KY, & Hillbilly Report are all 4’s.

The product of this equation represents the area of the circles below. These circles in no way include any metric or quantification of traffic. They’re all about links and quality of links. However, I do think it’s a fair comparison of how the lefty and righty blogospheres stack up in this state.

I tried doing this comparison with the mainstream media blogs, but most of them lack one metric or the other.

• DitchMitchKY.com , Kentucky Blogosphere
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