Saturday, January 27, 2007

Political Blogging Habits

The site "Political Opinions" provides access to a wide variety of political blogs and gives summeries of items shortly after they are posted, placed into different categories according to their source. Some 500 blogs get coverage and those categorised as "Labour", " Conservative" and "Lib Dem" cover similiar numbers of bloggers.

Between midnight to 10.30 a.m. this morning, the count of items posted is as follows -

Commentators 28, Conservatives 21, Labour 13, Lib Dems 11, Journalists 4 and Lords 0.

It is perhaps predictable that a group categorized as "Commentators" should be keen to comment and that the "Lords" at the other end should still be in bed, whilst the lack of "Journalists" items arises from the fact they are not being paid for their submissions.

The interesting thing about the contributions from the political categories is that many of the Labour and Lib Dem posts emerged in the early hours of the morning, whilst the Conservatives lead this list. Does this indicate a class bias towards those with time on their hands, whilst progressives suffer from sleepness nights?

Update

As the morning continues the trend to Conservatives and Commentators continues. Perhaps the Labour lot are all making their way to football matches. As I will be soon.

3 comments:

Political Opinions said...

Hi,

Your post has inspired me to finally getting around to adding a stats page to the political opinions site. Its now online at: http://politicalopinions.co.uk/page/stats/.

It will hopefully be useful to you and others who want to monitor the activity of the UK Political blogosphere.

Thanks,

Grant

Harry Barnes said...

Grant,

Thanks muchly.

I have obviously been very unfair to journalists. Ignoring the single entries of the Greens, the UUP, the SNP and the Scot Libs the overall posts per blogger work out roughly as follows -
Journalists 369, Commentators 113, Conservatives 96, Labour 80, Lib Dems 73.

Congratulations on "Political Opinions", it saves me keeping a lengthy list of bloggers in my favourites list and keeps me up to date on who is up to what.It also provides a lesson - try to grab people's attention in the first two lines, as well as with the title.

Political Opinions said...

I'm glad you've found the site useful Harry.

Theres some other features that may make it even more useful to you, they're a little bit more complex to setup but can be quite powerful. If you register on the site then you can setup your own personal feed, this will then only show you articles from blogs you are interested in rather than all of the blogs in the system. For example my feed is: http://politicalopinions.co.uk/user/Grant.

Journalists aren't quite as good as the stats would lead you to believe. One of the feeds in the journalist category is the BBC news feeed, I suspect this has many thousands of articles and so skews the stats slightly. I've just altered the stats page to ignore the bbc feed so the stats showing now should be more accurate. This brings the journalists average posts down too: 96.35.

If theres any other stats you think should be on the page then please do let me know and I will do my best to get them up there.

Thanks,

Grant