Wired: LGF’s Shift Away From Conservatism Reflected in Linking Behavior
I’m being analyzed quite dispassionately from afar, with the cold eye of science, in an article at Wired on using data from the Memeorandum automated aggregator: Memeorandum Colors 2012: Visualizing Bias on Political Blogs.
Along with this release, we now have four years of historical activity to work with. The collected scores are on Google Fusion Tables, and I’ve included a dump of the activity in Github.
Looking at historical activity can reveal some interesting trends, especially in how attitudes have shifted since the last election.
For example, Little Green Footballs is a long-running political weblog started by Charles Johnson, a web developer who aligned himself with the conservative right wing after the World Trade Center attacks. In late 2009, he publicly parted ways with the right.
That shift away from conservatism was reflected in his linking behavior at least a year before his public statement. If you look at the timeline below, you can see that Johnson started linking to a wider variety of stories outside the conservative conversation, until his activity was mostly neutral in early 2010. Now, his activity tends neutral but slightly favors articles popular in the liberal blogosphere.
Well, hey! I could have told you that if you’d asked.