Prometheus 6

Terrance at Republic of T on

Blogging While Brown, Part III

...Of the 71.1 million blogs tracked by Technorati alone that would be about 7,821,000. And that’s probably too large. Narrowing it down to just the number of blogs in Technorati’s directory of political blogs yields a more reasonable 42,895 political blogs.

If those 42, 895 poltiical blogs, follow general updating patterns, then only about 10.2% of them are updated at least once a week. That’s 4,375 political blogs that are updated often enough to sustain regular readerships. If only those blogs follow the same pattern of diversity of blogs in general then only 11% of them, or about 481, are written by African American bloggers. That number is probably too big also. Only about 303 blogs come up in a directory search of black politics, and only 130 under African American politics. If you want to break it down to just those of us who are specifically electorally-focused, well you might be able to count us on your fingers. Maybe take one shoe off just for insurance.

That’s only part of the double whammy. African American political bloggers, as Rabb points out, automatically end up addressing topics and issues that even a lot of progressives would rather not talk about. The response ranges from ignoring uncomfortable issues, to nervously sidestepping them, all the way to outright hostility when they’re brought up.

...and blogrolls.

How I Missed the Great Blogroll Purge

I wasn’t looking, in part, because I kind of had my own “blogroll purge” back in 2005, when I pruned from my blogroll every “A-List” blog that had never linked to me. And when I made the switch over to Google Reader, number of those same blogs got pruned from my newsfeeds. I don’t, for example, subscribe to the main feed for DailyKos any more. Instead I subscribe to the feeds for the tags I’m interested in, and read the diaries in those categories. By the same token, I don’t subscribe to Americablog’s feed anymore either. Instead I subscribe to the feeds from a few custom searches at Google’s Blog Search. As a result, see a variety of posts on those topics.

Terrance hits one out of the park on a fairly regular basis.