What is a ‘progressive’ blog? (Pay attention; there’s a quiz at the end)

Ultimately it depends on one’s definition and on the purpose one has in pursuing progressive blog reading. In my case, that means a blog may demonstrate an open-mindedness to moral or human nature matters - which is progress - yet may not really add to the political discourse anything at all - which is opposite my purpose. Or if you prefer, my obsession. Thus, I can exclude blogs (or blogzines) like Gawker or Defamer from my definition, but not Wonkette, who displays a fair amount of attention to progressive politics amid her stargazing & gossipy entertainment.

It gets harder from there. If someone claims to be progressive, or even centrist, but displays some positions much further to the right, should I accept their self-definition? There’s no easy answer for that. I wouldn’t exclude every progressive who was misled into initial support for this war, but if they display too much love for warring in general, or show a broader conservative streak, I’m not prone to list them as progressive because they display some racial, gender or sexual identity tolerance.

Bob Packwood was pro-choice and there’s Log Cabin Republicans, but both display more conservativism than progressivism in my book. Among high traffic bloggers, I tend to disfavor, for example, Michael Totten as a progressive. And Dean’s World’s upholding of ‘liberal tradition’ falls well short of progressive.

Libertarians draw similar critique from me. Doctrinaire Libertarians display more adherence to ideology than humanity in my book. Yet there are quite a few pragmatic Libertarians that meet my standards for progressive. I’m sure I’ll find bloggers and readers who’ll dispute my choices, but they’re mine and I’m sticking with them.

There’s more pertinent glitches in my methodology, in any case, as my aim is to define the 50 most-read progressive blogs. The only comprehensive rating system available is The Truth Laid Bear’s traffic rankings, yet many bloggers don’t use SiteMeter or don’t register to be included at TTLB, so it’s hardly a definitive list. I know, for example, that the tech-centric Doc Searls displays sufficient progressive positions to list and is among the highest trafficked blogs in existence, yet TTLB doesn’t list him. Nor does it list Talking Points Memo, which is surely in the top 5 or 10.

There’s also been evidence of some gaming of the traffic numbers in a very few instances, and no, I won’t explain how that can be done. Nor can I explain why the same blog gets two or three listings in that system, with identical or different numbers. But out of 200 or so that I went through, probably 30 were duplicates.

Among the hardest is deciding on blogs so neutral that a bias is hard to discern at all. The law blog How Appealling and the science blog Pharyngula I decided to include, but in case they don’t meet your standards, I included a 51st blog.

Finally, there’s some who get on the list one week and miss it the next because they got a traffic spike for some reason, or others did. Still, I generally see about 75% of the same blogs on this list pretty regularly, so it does serve as a general guide to the content most popular among readers of progressives. I lined through two that made the list, but are officially retired, and included two more to provide 50 to 52 active bloggers, total.

I gotta work with the material source (TTLB) and personal biases at hand, though, despite the lack of pure science in the process. And as of September 26th, this is the Top 50 I arrived at.

Top 50 Progressive Bloggers:
(displayed in groups of 10)

1) Daily Kos 297802 visits/day
3) Eschaton 130938 visits/day
8) The Washington Monthly 55336 visits/day
9) Wonkette 53102 visits/day
11) The Smirking Chimp 39450 visits/day
13) Blog for America 33746 visits/day
16) Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire 27729 visits/day
25) Drudge Retort: Red Meat for Yellow Dogs 21749 visits/day
28) MyDD 15895 visits/day
32) This Modern World 13067 visits/day

38) pandagon.net 12430 visits/day
39) TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime 12417 visits/day
45) onegoodmove 11662 visits/day
49) Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal 9523 visits/day
56) The Left Coaster 7305 visits/day
58) The Agonist 7186 visits/day
60) Orcinus 7003 visits/day
66) LiberalOasis 6455 visits/day
76) Rooftop Report 5165 visits/day
80) TBogg 5104 visits/day

89) Discourse.net 4371 visits/day
92) The Blogging of the President: 2004 4135 visits/day
95) In Search of Utopia 3959 visits/day
96) Jesus’ General 3936 visits/day
101) Catch — catch.com 3665 visits/day
103) Swing State Project 3607 visits/day
105) How Appealing 3253 visits/day
106) corrente 3154 visits/day
107) The Poor Man 3123 visits/day
112) Stupid Evil Bastard 2957 visits/day

123) Brian Flemming’s Weblog 2596 visits/day
124) Rising Hegemon 2593 visits/day
129) Mark A. R. Kleiman 2539 visits/day
130) August J. Pollak - xoverboard.com 2527 visits/day
132) The American Street 2475 visits/day
133) Roger Ailes 2450 visits/day
143) Calpundit 2071 visits/day (defunct)
149) Off the Kuff 1983 visits/day
153) Seeing The Forest 1890 visits/day
154) WatchBlog 1876 visits/day
157) Madeleine Begun Kane 1814 visits/day

160) lies.com 1781 visits/day
161) Sadly, No! 1758 visits/day
173) Deltoid 1570 visits/day
175) Pharyngula 1539 visits/day
176) Conclusive Evidence–of Dave Cullen’s existence 1535 visits/day
185) South Knox Bubba 1481 visits/day
186) IsThatLegal? 1471 visits/day
187) KEN LAYNE 1453 visits/day
196) Tristero 1385 visits/day
197) The Minor Fall, The Major Lift 1363 visits/day (Defunct)
199) Rising Hegemon 1338 visits/day

200) Political State Report 1322 visits/day
205) skippy the bush kangaroo 1291 visits/day
208) Balkinization 1280 visits/day
213) Lean Left 1231 visits/day
214) slacktivist 1217 visits/day
217) uggabugga 1198 visits/day
220) Angry Bear 1185 visits/day
226) ArchPundit 1130 visits/day
227) tonypierce.com + busblog 1123 visits/day
232) UnFairWitness 1104 visits/day

233) Burnt Orange Report 1103 visits/day

There’s several reasons I pursue this unscientific exercise. The ego boost of having TAS in this group isn’t much, though having so many good content providers as part of our team (shown in bold) provides the satisfaction of knowing we’re helping deliver a recognizable service of talent delivery.

At the same time, having spent the past 3 years reading thousands of blogs, right and left, political or not, I’m also certain that among the thousand plus progressives on our links page, there’s 100-150 others I know of that deliver content as good or even better than many on this top 50 list. I recruit from both, so even TAS members not in this top 50 are roughly equivalent in the talent department, in my estimation.

Just consider some bloggers that everyone knows of - or should know of - that don’t appear above. Where’s Talking Points Memo? Body and Soul? Suburban Guerrilla? Negrophile? Whiskey Bar? Ed Cone? Alicublog? Informed Comment? Pacific Views? The Leiter Reports? Nathan Newman? Many are just as polished. Some do great research, some beautiful prose, some warm community, and some snortifiable snark. There’s a number of professional journalists besides Josh Marshall and other experts in other fields as well.

Also, if you look at the actual traffic this Top 50 generates, the price of admission is not so high between #20 and #50. But the top 20, and especially the top 10, take an enormous amount of talent and hard, hard work to draw that well.

Now the obvious problem is there’s simply too much talent to visit them all daily. As a result, many readers get a bit lazy, reading only the top 5 or 10 because ‘everyone does’. If that’s where you’re stuck, I feel sorry for you, because of so much happy-tummy-blogginess you’re skipping to achieve Stepford Wife unison with the mob.

Why not take the road less travelled? Read through one state’s blogs from our directory today. And through another state tomorrow. Nearly 40 states can easily be reviewed this way while the others may take 2 days or a week. Or read through the blogs of all our team members in one day (see ‘American Team’ on our sidebar).

If every blog reader did this, I bet no two personal Top 50 lists would look identical. I bet some other talented bloggers would get more readers. And more readers would be better read.

Billmon suggests this blogtopia will be hurt by commercialization, with a few sold out to ‘da man’ and the rest marginalized. Steve Gilliard has a more optimistic view about its dynamics and vitality. Oh, and a rebuttal to Billmon.

So what do you think? Are the ad sales going to diminish the quality and community of progressives? And, besides this top 50 list and your own blog - if you have one - who do you consider to be essential reading?