I may have stumbled across the next great social commentator of our time. The person will remain anonymous, but in an email discussion about massive amount of blog hits, here was the salient comment:

If you really want a lot of hits, it seems the best tactic is to write lunatic rants about one or another political side, yielding no sense of an idea that others’ have motivations that might be in the least valid, and that those on your political side (so long as they hew to your personal interpretation) are angels. That’ll reliably draw the 0.5% of the population that gets no affirmation anywhere else.

Whadda ya think? Did he nail it?

I think he does, as evidenced in “Map: Welcome to the Blogosphere”by Stephen Ornes from Discover magazine:

The blogosphere is the most explosive social network you’ll never see. Recent studies suggest that nearly 60 million blogs exist online, and about 175,000 more crop up daily (that’s about 2 every second). Even though the vast majority of blogs are either abandoned or isolated, many bloggers like to link to other Web sites. These links allow analysts to track trends in blogs and identify the most popular topics of data exchange. Social media expert Matthew Hurst recently collected link data for six weeks and produced this plot of the most active and interconnected parts of the blogosphere.

1 MR. POPULARITY
On the map, white dots represent individual blogs, sized according to number of links. Nearly 500,000 people visit the DailyKos every day, making it one of the world’s most popular blogs. A link from DailyKos is a guaranteed way of attracting Web traffic (and therefore advertising revenue), and as a result DailyKos has a strict link policy. Green links represent one-way links (that is, blog A links to blog B), and blue links indicate reciprocal links (blog B returns the favor).
[…]

Update 5/2/2007: Tech Crunch nails another web phenomena: Digg users determine the news….as they say “Viva La revolution!” (and you thought it was bad when MSM editors decided what would be aired/printed….)

H/T: Little Green Footballs and LGF reader Ward Cleaver

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