Atrios and Kevin are only replaced by guest bloggers when they are off line for extended periods.  TPM is already starting along Markos' path of a weekend commentator largely replacing Josh. He's followed a very different path from Markos, but I think content generation will be largely the same--a few front page contributors on the TPM page, and a new model for user generate content that will not be like the diaries.

I also don't think you should underestimate the impact of comments.  GG and FDL owe much of their success to engagement with their commentariat. In Glenn's case, it reinforces trust and transparency. In FDL's case, it creates a sense of community and stability.

of the interactive model would seem to be that ideas will matter more than individuals.  Any person can contribute a suggestion, a meme, a potential policy to address his/her own pet issue, and as the community "peer reviews" the proposal, better ideas will ultimately emerge.  

For example, one idea that seems to be getting lots of traffic lately concerns a "Manhattan Project" or "Marshall Plan" for alternative energy, and what form that plan should take.  Personally, I'm a big fan of solar and wind, and of distributed/household generation, rather than large power plant generation.  And while the Kos community has a lot of different opinions, virtually every thread discussing renewable energy seems to have a significant number of supporters of a "Plan" that would have the federal government invest in these areas.  Ultimately, as the blogoshpere delivers not only notice and elevate individual candidates, the sphere may also be able to elevate policies that can receive substantial public support.  

That, it seems to me, is what may lead to Senator Schumer's goal of a 60% or 65% majority.  Policy proposals which can be taken to the wider public after having been vetted by those who are genuinely interested in the issues, and who are committed enough to work out the kinks through dialogue and discussion with others who are equally involved and committed.  

The other problem is the party leadership is setting up Phoney well funded blogs that look like grassroots blogs but only their messages end up showing up on the main pages, i.e. they are trying to control the message.

The other trend that I am seeing is that there will be a very increase in  community-based state and local blogs which focus on local environmental and political issues as well as partisan campaigns.

As blogs have evolved to provide a very powerful supplement, alternative, and critical function for the national press, they will also find growing utility in the local political arena, where local newspapers and radio have an even lower standard of coverage than the national media.

Local blogs also will grow as activists, united by the national blogs, seek each other out at a local level to go beyond their local and state party organizations.

This is where support of BlogPac, which understands the importance of the local communities for direct democracy, is pushing the envelope of progressive space, adding both financial and political leverage to activists' contributions.

It's at the local level where the political junkies who glue their eyeballs to the national blogs will meet another batch of less active participants in the political process, who are engaged in what's happening in their backyard.

A stalwart national audience, coupled with a growing set of local audiences, will continue to push a populist, progressive shift in society from the corporate media.

Alexa numbers are dependent on the Alexa toolbar. Not sure if the distribution of the toolbar is keeping up with general internet growth. Alexa is probably still a good indicator of relative traffic but I'd be suspicious of absolute numbers, unless they match up well with internal measures of traffic.

In the (not so) long run won't "blogs" and the "blogosphere" lose meaning?

The web/internets are really one giant hard drive we access as users or contribute to as content providers.

I do not think we are near the apex of those uses.

I think what you're describing is the transition from an open to a competitive market dynamic.  Price of entry is now high enough that solo bloggers are not quite making it in, and established bloggers are  innovating to retain their share.

Interesting stats about Kos...

The data about declining traffic may be an artifact of the increasing use of RSS feeds.

Most blogs, including MyDD, have a "complete" feed -- i.e., the entire article including links is delivered to the client program (e.g., NetNewsWire) or website (e.g., FeedBurner). With the entire article including images being delivered this way, there's no incentive to click through and visit the web site to be counted as traffic.

Currently, RSS traffic is counted separately from direct website hits, or not at all (the format of the RSS pages makes it hard to add the standard hit counters, so most people don't).

As RSS gets more popular, it's possible that increasing numbers of readers just aren't getting counted.

I'd love to see the equivalent of SiteMeter or ExtremeTracking for RSS, but there are technical reasons why this would be hard for a lot of bloggers to implement (most of the solutions I know of involve having access to the raw traffic of the web server, and being able to run server-side scripts that record information in files on the server, and a lot of people lack the know-how to do this). It's possible (WordPress.com has as solution that sort of works, but it's hard to tell how well because they don't release the raw data), but doesn't yet exist in a widely applicable form.

Just my $0.02 on the subject -- before we fall all over ourselves trying to explain a phenomenon, it would be nice to know if the phenomenon exists or is just an artifact of our measurement techniques.

The sheer diversity also plays a role in limiting growth. A newcomer to the blogsphere is going to end up reading several dozen blogs, actually visit a half-dozen daily, and become part of the "community" on maybe one if at all. Ultimately people will start to segregate into blog silos, simply because each megablog provides so much content that going elsewhere is counter-productive. The big blogs link to each other which provides some lateral traffic but as a community ethos develops, readers tend to go vertical/deep into it rather than stray outside.

What's needed is a way to get content flowing horizontally. Ultimately a diary is just another single-autor blog, and communities like Dailykos are meta-blogs. If we can expand the meta to include the whole blogsphere, and scale upwards so that indivudual author blogs serve the same function as reader diaries do, then theres a potentially higher ceiling on the community size than any one single blog/metablog can support.

That means we need analogous mechanism like recomended lists and "promotion" for users' individual blogs across the whole liberal blogspace. In one sense bloggers like Atrios (or Glenn Reynolds) serve that function, by highlighting posts from various otherblogs and causing a traffic avalanche. And by inviting bloggers to their frontpages on a temp basis. However these are manual efforts and can't possibly scale.

One solution is a kind of real-time carnival approach hosted on everyone's sidebars. I've implemented one for the Islamic blogsphere and the details are here. A larger version of teh same would probably scale up quite well. This, coupled with OpenID type of universal auth would I think build horizontal links within the libsphere.

I don't pay anything to view MyDD every day, although the content is so good, I would gladly pay for it.

With a liberal Democratic woman, running in 2008, as well as a Black US Senator and a Latino Governor seeking the Democratic nomination for President, it stands to reason that all of these groups will be at least slightly more interested in political news over the next two years.  History is in the making, one way or another.

Considering that all of these groups are underrepresented here to one degree or another, this would seem to be a good opportunity to increase site traffic by reaching out to new demographic groups.

For example, with just 1.5% Black participation here at present, an uptick of just a couple of percentage points could mean a considerable number of additional people accessing the blog.  An increase in women users could similarly be significant. (I'm not a statistician, so I'm not going to calculate the exact number of additional people that an uptick of one or two percentage points would bring.  But in an election, it would certainly be considered to be a significant number of people.)

If Coca Cola only sold 1.5% of its soda to Blacks, you can bet that they would perceive that as a high-priority opportunity for growth.

Black voting patterns (90+ % vote for Democrats) mean that there MUST be some overlap between what is important to white progressives and what is important to Blacks.  The market is there.

Whenever a corporation attempts to increase diversity, it is confronted with issues of corporate culture that may be adverse to the new groups that the corporation seeks to attract.  

Blacks are unlikely to express diverse opinions in at atmosphere where whites immediately challenge not only their facts and their opinions but their right to post at all.  Every time you suggest that someone may be a "troll", you implicitly suggest that perhaps the (white) majority should take action to remove that person from the membership.  In an atmosphere wherein whites anonymously use majority rule to determine what may be said and what may not, there is always the risk that diverse opinions will be discouraged or eliminated.

To suggest that Blacks women and other sociological minorities can avoid discrimination by not acknowledging their group status is to suggest that we can pursue the goals of equality without acknowledging that any differences exist.    If I cannot express what electing the first Black President of the United States would mean to me, as a Black man, then that which is most important to me about the upcoming election will be off-limits and there is no purpose for my participation.  So, remaining "colorless" is not an option for me in terms of carving out a space for my political voice.

I suggest that MyDD and DailyKos increase their readership by increasing the proportion of minority and women readers to match the proportion of minorities and women participating within the Democratic electorate.  This is not something that you would do only in the interests of these underrepresented groups, but also to achieve your own political goals.  You will have a better idea of what will motivate higher minority voter turn-out there are minorities among you, expressing their opinions, offering their support, and directly accessing their own constituencies through channels to which you may not have access.

The change in stats to fewer people online but talking amongst themselves more may point to the blogs becoming a bit more insular.  With established cliques of old users able to bounce newcomers whose presence they view as a challenge or threat, exacerbating the process.

The fact that the blogs seem to be an older, white middle class phenomenon that doesn't attract blacks,  Latinos and Asians may be another limiting factor. Attracting just one demographic probably has built in limits.

"First, the already extreme gap between the political engagement of netroots activists and rank-and-file voters will grow even wider."

The reverse may actually be true. Not spending time online may be a sign of greater political engagement...kind of a play on those who can do, those who can't blog.

Another factor is that mentioned in some recent articles about the blogs that their main political impact has been as a source of money.

One of the threads mentioned the "zeitgeist" and we've only really seen that in couple cases, Dean's original Meetup phenom, MoveOn's origin, Webb's campaign and most recently Ibama's Facebook rally organized by college kids.

There's probably some fracturing of the blogosphere, more sites making it hard to judge increases or decreases in traffic level.

If American schools were better and civics lessons replaced teaching to the test-lessons we would see an increase in political activism and blog readership.

Just as I once proclaimed that the aristocratic right-wing blogosphere was stagnating, it now seems that the community oriented left-wing blogosphere is stagnating as well.

Wha ... ?  The right blogsphere hit a wall because of their culture and blog design, even though we were in an election year.  

The "plateau" for the left, however, is exactly what you would expect in 2007.  Let's see what happens as the presidential races heat up.  
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Right around the time it became apparent that Dems were doing well - specifically when the dems starting having a huge lead in the generic ballot - traffic stopped going up.  

11/2003 to 11/2004 USA today generic poll data - (question 4-1), essentially tied through this time period

9/2005-11/2006 generic data: dems have commanding lead of 5-20 points through this entire time period

It's hard to separate cause from effect, but my take is that there just isn't as much incentive to get involved in politics these days, as the world doesn't seem as screwed-up as it used to be.  As you point out, Dems are in charge of congress, and we the people will trust them (or at least, give them a chance) to be our representatives, and hope they don't screw it up.

To me, it's surprising the growth lasted as long as it did, as Bush was just so utterly wrong he pissed us off and allowed the lefty blogosphere to keep growing.  It's going to stagnate now that there isn't a daily outrage to keep motivating people, and instead of stepping up to the plate and putting life on hold (like emptywheel has done with the Libby scandal), a percentage of people will go on to do other fulfilling work that seems more pressing than politics.

However, once people are in and engaged, they won't just disappear: this community is here to stay, and I agree they'll continue to get more knowledgeable as well as autonomous as time goes on, starting more projects as they find their niche and dig in.

It's becoming a regular occurrence that recommended diaries at MyDD are drawing more comments than the front page posts for the day.  This very rarely happened in the past, in my recollection, and is another sign that the members of this community get better ideas (or, more likely, are better at filtering them) the longer they are engaged in the netroots.  Should we start measuring our age in blog-years?

I think diversity is the key here. The kinds of political blogging that predominate now have probably reached or are reaching a plateau. I think that goes for both single-author and user-generated sites. There are only so many people out there who are a) Progressive/Liberal, b) interested primarily in national, partisan politics c) interested in nuts-and-bolts policy stuff and/or horse-race and message stuff d) have the time and resources and background necessary to contribute to the netroots as currently constituted. And there are only so many blogs those people can read and write.

I personally don't see much value in user-generated content for informing myself about national politics. I'd much rather pick a spectrum of strong individual voices who are amenable to me or who challenge me in interesting ways, and use them as my filter. For most group blogs that I read, I only read one or two particular authors, and ignore most of the other posts. And I haven't found comment sections to be very fruitful at most larger blogs, though a few of the mid-tier ones(slacktivist, making light, and obsidian wings come to mind) have very good signal-to-noise ratios in the comments, and are worth the effort.

But, user-generated content is good for lots of other things, most of which we aren't taking advantage of in the political sphere yet. Fundraising, for one, which we've gotten a taste of already. Covering local issues and building local grassroots communities is the biggie, though what that really amounts to in national politics is kind of debatable. But in local politics, this is going to be the new huge thing, I hope, and the effects of that will eventually have huge ramifications for the national picture as well if it does happen.  

The current range of uses and users are a pretty narrowly-defined group, and just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible. First, you have digital divide issues, which probably exclude a big chunk of the Left's potential or actual economically-self-interested constituency. Not many working-poor-single-moms are going to have the time and the money and the access to really be able to contribute, or often even to find out there is something to contribute to. Add lots of rural folks, the elderly, and people for whom English isn't a first language, and so on and on, and that's a whole lot of room for growth in the long run.

There is also the restrictiveness of defining the netroots as just the traffic that goes to the blog format, when at this point, there are tons of other networked tools and mini-mediums out there to fill a huge number of niches and needs. Email, IM, Social Networking, Wikis, SMS, Video, Audio, etc. I think the totality of social software gets overshadowed a bit too much by just blogging. Blogging is one of the easier-to-master and engage of these technologies, so that's understandable, but it's probably not even going to be the dominant networked medium of the next 10 years.

But if there is a serious digital divide in even the fairly low-barrier-to-entry medium of blogging, then getting people to the point where they can take full advantage of all of these technologies to meet their own needs and build their own communities and movements(and without getting overly bogged down in learning and maintaining it all) is going to be a huge, huge task.

I think going local, and starting to use the web more as a holistic organizing tool to facilitate and lower barriers to entry for ongoing local movements and groups, which would bring on board both the organizers who are pounding pavement and the people they are trying to organize, is a big piece of the puzzle. But so is obtaining access and computer skills for the kinds of people who would most benefit from taking part in such communities. Maybe using whatever existing grassroots infrastructure there is to help teach/evangelize is a start, but more blogosphere support for mostly apolitical digital divide and computer education initiatives would probably be a good thing, and more dialogue between the (also often relatively apolitical) people building the tools and the people using them is a must. More of us getting down in the trenches and helping local groups get themselves online and learn to use the tools and participate in the conversation, or, better yet, start their own, different conversations would be a great thing as well.

But, that's easier said than done, and a lot of it is indeed going to come down to money. And if the equivalents of mass-media in our little corner can't sustain themselves, then it doesn't bode well for the bigger and more difficult projects to come. We need a steady source of funding both for grassroots community work and national/mass media message work, and ways to let people who have these in-demand tech and communications skills get out there and use them for political and social ends, on a professional basis. Volunteerism is great, but in my experience, without some sort of permanent professional presence to guide it, a lot of the effort goes to waste or is redundant, and even moreso with tech-related stuff. I've lost count of how many utterly wrongheaded and hideous small candidate and local group websites I've come across. And I'm sure lots of effort and maybe even money went into making those, for little or no tangible return. From the techie end of the equation, volunteerism is also frustrating because you often just can't put in a consistent enough effort to sustain and nurture what you are trying to build, when you also have a day job and lots of other things eating up your hours. I believe the web can be a great multiplier and engine of effort and connection, but we've got to figure out how, when, and where to best use it, and how to pay for it, before that hope can bear fruit.

This was a really great posting! I think it's a bit sad that the single-politician blogs are no longer working well since they can be very interesting as well. Of course it's great that the audience have a greater chance to speak but I like the old kind of blogs as well.

And I have to say that blogs like this is way much more interesting than social communities like Facebook....

Douglas, Programmer currently working on the Men's Health Online Pharmacies project.

This was very interesting reading and I think you might be right in what you're saying. I really hope the political blogs won't die though, they're way to interesting.

Marlena, Web Developer currently working on the Caalis, Cails, Calis project.

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