MarketWatch: Bloggers blew it

MarketWatch's Frank Barnako baits bloggers - a fine pastime for those seeking instant traffic spikes - by pointing out that a very, very low percentage of the electorate bothered to check up on political blogs on election day. He taunts them with accusations that blog audiences are merely a bunch of bloggers "like mice in a rotating cage." In fact, blog audiences are quite small relative to the number of blogs, and they've never approached the status of a mass medium, even considered together as a group. But, in an odd twist of logic, he points to the lack of a significant rise in young and black voters on the ineffectiveness of blogs. (Actually, there were more young and black voters in this year's elections than in recent memory, although the proportions didn't seem to change much.)

More to the point, few bloggers have been attempting to take credit for such a nonexistent rise, perhaps fearing that such claims would be both pompous and inaccurate. It might be that the MarketWatch columnist made the lazy association between the typical politics of blogs (left-leaning) with the typical politics of youth and blacks (left-leaning) and assumed that effective blogs should have turned these people out in greater numbers. But, in actuality, blogs skew mostly male and white, with conflicting information on ages, most studies putting the average blog reader age above the 18-29 demo Barnako notes.