Who are we? What are we thinking about or responding to or passionate about or interested in? On October 21, 2009, I gave a talk to NPR Weekend Edition and Digital staff, during their staff retreat. The topic was "Navigating the World Live Web." My goal was to look at how we can tell new kinds of stories from the intentional and unintentional data streams being created by millions of users of the internet. Or, to use Paul Simon's memorable phrase, "the way we look to us all." Here's the video:

Is political blogging no longer a place for the individual, crusading voice? Do you have to be part of a group blog, and ideally backed by a big media property, to flourish in the national political blogosphere in the U.S.? Two powerful indie-bloggers, the pseudonymous Digby and the once-pseudonymous Atrios (Duncan Black), posted links back to my Friday post about Technorati's new top blogs metric, that in essence expressed nostalgia for those good 'ol days when all it took was a PC and a strong point of view to make it in the Big Blogcity.

Back in January, we updated our list of the fifty top political blogs, using one simple metric: # of incoming links as measured by the blog search engine Technorati. Well, the good folks at Technorati (yes, the company founded by my smarter little brother) have just rolled out a wholesale site redesign, along with some changes in how they track and rank blogs. The biggest change, for our purposes, is that they're no longer basing that metric on the past six months of blogospheric data. As they explain on their company blog:

Because most searches are looking for items less than a month old, we’re going to narrow that window in a similar way. In the past, because the data window was so long, Authority and the Top 100 lists it powered were relatively static. With the new algorithm, the resulting Authority will better reflect the fast-changing nature of the blogosphere. Its new inherent volatility will also show which blogs are rising and falling in authority, rewarding authors on posting frequency, context and linking behavior, as well as other data inputs.

So, given that Technorati is resetting the calipers, it makes sense for us to also update our guide to the top political blogs, which we're in the process of doing. But I wanted to highlight for you the most interesting effect of this update, which is a look at which blogs have risen or fallen significantly in their rank over the course of this year.

The news that American southerners are the most likely to question whether President Obama is actually a native-born citizen got a lot of attention last Friday, when a Research2000 survey on that question was released by DailyKos. Eleven percent of all Americans apparently do not believe Obama was born in the United States, but 23% of southerners (compared to roughly 5% of people from the other regions of the country) share that belief. I thought it would be interesting to see what various trend-culling tools might add to this picture.

A look at Google Trends is certainly illuminating. The top ten states where people are searching on the phrase "Obama birth certificate" are:
1. Louisiana
2. Mississippi
3. Colorado
4. Oklahoma
5. Alabama
6. Tennessee
7. Arkansas
8. Missouri
9. South Carolina
10. North Carolina

Judging from Technorati's tracking of the use of the terms "obamacare" and "public option," the effort by Republican message-meisters and blogger-activists to frame the health care reform bill as a new version of "Hillarycare" (and thus defeat it) appears to be gaining traction, at least as a tag:

We've been doing some housecleaning (in preparation for rolling out a site upgrade) and it's been some time since I dug in and updated our list of top political blogs. Indeed, an embarrassingly long time. Sorry!

Anyway, here's a fully revised and up-to-date list of the top 50 political blogs, along with two top 20 lists for the top liberal and conservative blogs. All three lists are based on Technorati's measure of "authority," which is the number of incoming links to the blog for the last six months. Let me be the first to emphasize that this is hardly a perfect metric. The number of incoming links shown by Technorati sometimes varies, which is a quirk of how their databases work. And not all incoming links are created equal, but Technorati has no way of saying so. In other words, please don't obsess about a blog's exact position on these lists, as bloggers like to say, your mileage may vary.

There have been a number of good critiques of President-elect Obama's one-way use of YouTube to broadcast his weekly radio address (see especially my colleague Ellen Miller and John Dickerson's takes) and so I'm not going to repeat them here. By posting the address on YouTube--even without comments or ratings allowed--Obama is allowing us to see something that we couldn't see before when presidential addresses were just on radio: who cares to listen and who cares to link.

It's been a while since I've checked in on our charts tracking how the campaigns are doing on the web, and even though we're now firmly headed into the August doldrums before the national conventions, some interesting trends are worth noting. In a word: Obama keeps adding friends, but McCain has been gaining traffic. And Bob Barr seems to have some real grass-roots support...

As you may have noticed, we've made some spiffy design improvements to techPresident, all in the name of easily findable and navigable charts.

Our-ever popular charts showing how the candidates are faring on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Eventful, and in the blogosphere have had the same alpha-stage design for some time, so we've given them a facelift.