They say that the political blogosphere is more polarized than the world at large. For once, there's actually a "they" there -- GW professors Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell (via Andrew Sullivan). Their new study finds that 94% of readers of political blogs only political blogs on their own side of the ideological spectrum. Here's the abstract:

We find that blog readers gravitate toward blogs that accord with their political beliefs. Few read blogs on both the left and right of the ideological spectrum. Furthermore, those who read left-wing blogs and those who read right-wing blogs are ideologically far apart. Blog readers are more polarized than either non-blog-readers or consumers of various television news programs, and roughly as polarized as US senators. Blog readers also participate more in politics than nonblog readers. Readers of blogs of different ideological dispositions do not participate less than those who read only blogs of one ideological disposition. Instead, readers of both left- and right-wing blogs and readers of exclusively leftwing blogs participate at similar levels, and both participate more than readers of exclusively right-wing blogs. This may reflect social movement-building efforts by left-wing bloggers.

Here's where it gets particularly interesting for our purposes. Research cited in the study finds that, contra the current state of blog reading practices, exposure to a wider range of political perspectives helps to make blog readers more tolerant. But it is also associated with depressed levels of political engagement. To flip it around, you consume more news (online, and, perhaps, on cable TV) and get more politically engaged -- but it's a polarized, less tolerant engagement. Tricky. Grab a copy of Self-Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership, Participation, and Polarization in American Politics here.

Credit:RadarOnline

Point proven? Above the Law traces the origins of the John Roberts retirement rumor that spread about the Internet yesterday back to a Georgetown Law professor who floated the fake news as part of a class lesson on how what seem like credible sources might actually turn out to be engaging in somewhat questionable pedagogy! ABT quotes a 1L in the professor's class:

Today’s class was partially on the validity of informants not explaining their sources. [Professor Tague] started off class at around 9 am EST by telling us not to tell anyone, but that we might find it interesting that tomorrow, Roberts would be announcing his retirement for health concerns. He refused to tell anyone how he knew. Then, at around 9:30, he let everyone in on the joke.

The time between the prof's dropping of the Roberts retirement "news" and a posting of the rumor on Radar? ("EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Considering Stepping Down.") Ten minutes. The time between when the professor let his kids in on the ruse and a Radar retraction? Six minutes. You almost get whiplash. Seems like the good professor might have wanted to institute a no-texting/no-emailing/no-iPhone/no-Blackberry rule before running his little classroom experiment.

Now some tech apologists might take a look at that episode and say "what's the problem?" The rumor was floated, shot down, and corrected within an hour. What's the damage, really? It'd be interesting to hear from Roberts whether he, in his heart of hearts, sees some sort of long-term and lasting ill effects from the gossip. It seems likely that part of the evolution of this wild and crazy news world is that we'll all learn to be more incredulous about things that seem farfetched, even if they are marked "exclusive." We learned that much from the whole Perez Hilton/Fidel Castro mess, didn't we? But really, it's tough to draw much more meaning from this little case study than the fact that (1) 1Ls are guilible and that (2) the good folks at Radar, who consider themselves journalists, should really think twice about considering "my professor told us in class this morning" a hard and fast source.

The silver lining of all this, though, is that #radarheadlines was a pretty funny Twitter meme while it lasted -- which was all of a few hours.

British writer James Crabtree has weighed in at The New Statesman with an absolutely fascinating prediction for the coming year of English online politics as the country heads into new elections: the balance of power and energy is going to shift from the right, which has long dominated the British political blogosphere, to the left. He writes...

There is, you may have noticed, a fairly raging debate taking place amongst those progressives armed with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection over the future of the health care bill. On the chance that you haven't been closely tracking the blow-by-blow, we present to you a quick guide to the players and the arguments they're making over whether the health care package emerging from the Senate's legislative process is something worth saving, or a botched mess deserving of a quick and merciless death.

But first, a brief synopsis of the state of things. It's facile to frame this debate as one between political activists and policy wonks. Firedoglake, the liberal blog hub that most fully fleshes out the vision of an activist/journalistic hybrid operating in the progressive space, a.k.a. the "netroots," has become ground zero for the debate. FDL's Jane Hamsher has been a dominant voice in what's being called the "Kill the Bill" camp. And certainly, arrayed on the other side of the spectrum are those folks who probably consider themselves journalists before activists, like the Washington Post's Ezra Klein and Mother Jones' Kevin Drum.

But that quick and dirty division points to something broader. The Better-than-Nothingers see the Senate reform bill as a starting point, fixating on the details of the package to make the case that passage now is demonstrably better for the country, the poor, the underinsured, and the uninsured than no legislative package at all. The political system will turn crude progress into more elegant reform as it goes about its business. The Bill Killers, on the other hand, seem to see this package as entrenching a political system, one that is largely unresponsive to activist influence. They want an overhaul. They want justice. A just system isn't one that further builds up health insurance behemoths and adds fertilizer to the entwinement of government and corporate America. And now, in their judgment, is the right moment to push for a different political and social reality.

With that, here's your quick guide to the intra-left debate taking place over whether health care reform is better than nothing -- or not...

CNBC's Washington correspondent John Harwood dropped a blind quote while on MSNBC this weekend that tarred criticisms of how the Obama White House has handled gay issues as a problem with the "Internet left fringe." Seeing an opening, it seems, Harwood weirdly took the moment to expand from marriage equality to all political opposition to Obama heard on the Internet. "For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn't take this opposition," reported Harwood to Lester Holt in a segment about yesterday's National Equality March, "one advisor told me today 'those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.'" Insta-controversy, your table is ready.

How much can you really do with a blind quote from one nameless administration "advisor," a quote that absent any real context comes across as little more than a taunt? Who knows, really. This may have been some planted rhetoric intended to paint the White House as strong in the face of domineering bloggers of the left. Or it may have been the work of one aide who got burned by some bloggers in the past and spotted a reporter ready to carry his or her water.

But what is worth noting is how the White House is showing a quiet eagerness to engage with online newsies, just not necessarily the very political and advocacy-minded folks of the political blogosphere. The new news ecosystem isn't foreign to them, they just see it -- and its utility -- differently. The Obama White House would much rather, it seems, route around those hard-core political bloggers and engage with the people who have positioned themselves online as community managers, folks who can be said to bring a constituency to the table (beyond the army of commenters and diarists some blogs and bloggers have). Case in point, the White House is right now, with no great fanfare, inviting the Consumerist and the Motley Fool to pull together questions for the White House on Obama's plan for reforming the "rules of the road" that the financial world has to follow, pegged of off a web video starring White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee.

That said, both the Obama campaign and the first nine months of the Obama Administration have suggested that the folks in the Obama universe see bloggers as more of an audience to be persuaded than as political actors to be engaged.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent gets an on-the-record quote from White House spokesperson Dan Pfeiffer. You get the sense that there's a great deal of fuzziness around how folks in this White House thing of the Internet and the people who hang out there. Here, Pfeiffer attests to the White House's great respect for "the online communities":

That sentiment does not reflect White House thinking at all, we’ve held easily a dozen calls with the progressive online community because we believe the online communities can often keep the focus on how policy will affect the American people rather than just the political back-and-forth.

Mother Jones interviewsMother Jones interviews Eric Boehlert, author of Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press and a senior fellow at Media Matters. MoJo asks Boehlert whether political bloggers on the left are serving as effective watchdogs now that we've got Barack Obama in the White House and Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. They are, says Boehlert. He frames his answer by talking of a blogger who blends some journalist, some activist, and some cheerleader:

I think they've been doing a really good job. They've split their time up into three activities. 50 percent of it is just playing defense against the unhinged right wing response on how Obama is a socialist and a Marxist and he wants to take your guns. 25 percent is trying to prod and cheerlead when the administration does something that it likes and that it approves of or maybe has a liberal flavor to it, and the other 25 percent is critiquing the administration. We've seen it on war funding, we've seen it on gay marriage, we've seen it on wire tapping. I think there was this notion, particularly among the conservative critics, to say, 'well Obama is elected, and bloggers are going to roll over and they're just going to be a mouthpiece for the administration.' But that's not what happened and I never thought it would because the blogosphere was never created to be an appendage to the DNC or to cheerlead Democratic politicians. It was always created to give a voice to liberalism in America. Liberal bloggers are still going to do that. I mean, they're happy that a Democrat is in the White House who's more receptive to their priorities and their agenda, but they're not just going to stop because a Democrat is in the White House.

Boehlert doesn't make the connection, but when he says the economics of progressive blogging are "frankly...pretty awful" and with few institutional funders -- well, beyond the omnipotent George Soros, of course (kidding!) -- there's an argument to be made that it's in fact this hybrid journalist-activist-critic-watchdog style of blogging that makes it difficult to match some bloggers with deep-pocketed supporters. At least, traditional funders who are looking to check a box when they write a check. That said, it's difficult to separate out the poor state of political blog funding from the general poor state of the economy, and the disastrous state of news publishing in particular.

There's been interesting flare-up in the perennial online argument over maintaining anonymity in the political blogosphere. National Review Online's Ed Whelan recently revealed the identity of a writer by the handle of Publius who blogs on the popular political site Obsidian Wings. The two, notes the New York Times' Eric Etheridge, had been rather heatedly going back and forth over the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Publius' bio on the site revealed only that s/he was a former Washington DC lawyer and now law professor in Texas who "likes to eat things with hot sauce on them." But Whelan caught wind of who Publius might truly be. He emailed the suspect, asking him to confirm his identity. Whelan was right, but Publius asked for discretion. Whelan refused. In response to the pulling back of the curtain on his identity, South Texas College of Law professor John Blevins, blogged, "I would never have done that to my harshest critic in a million years, but oh well."

In an interesting twist, Whelan seems to have come to regret the unmasking. He penned a mea culpa on NRO in which he said understatedly, "I have been uncharitable in my conduct towards the blogger who has used the pseudonym Publius." Of course, this being the Internet and all, once outed, Blevin's identity can't exactly be un-revealed.

Via something called Twitter, our own Ari Melber points out a story in the Columbia Journalism Review about the relative silence that has greeted that news that the Obama Administration has extended Bush-era policies on warrantless wiretapping. The Electronic Frontier Foundation first filed suit under the Bush Administration. But under agreement with the Justice Department, the case was held until after the November 8th election. The EFF, it's safe to say, expected the Obama Administration to be a more sympathetic ear for its interpretation of the ills of warrantless wiretapping. But the Obama DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder has instead stepped up to defend the Bush approach. In fact, they've expanded the argument to restrict citizens' ability to sue the federal government in response to improper surveillance.

The CJR piece's particular relevance here is where it focuses on blogger Glenn Greenwald, a formerly independent writer now with Salon. A very smart guy by the name of Ari Melber recently made the entirely sensible argument to me that any honest assessment of the real world influence and impact of the political blogosphere has to include the question, "Compared to what?" Here, the natural point of comparison is the more quote-unquote establishment press. CJR's Clint Hendler points out when it comes to sustaining the press narrative about Obama's state secret claims, Greenwald "almost certainly deserves sole credit for advancing the story thus far." The silence from the traditional media silence has been, Hendler notes, deafening. (Photo credit: cliff1066)

Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez has a fascinating report on models of the blogosphere's many-tendriled thought sharing that go far beyond information-thin "A is connected to B is connected to..." mappings...Don't let the acronyms fool you -- the SEC's embrace of XBRL is exciting stuff. The Securities and Exchange Commission has mandated that public companies and mutual funds publish their financial data in a common structured format...Stanford professor Larry Lessig was recently the guest of honor at a salon sponsored by Netroots Nation...and more.

The pyramid of Internet political functions consists of message (communications), money (fundraising) and mobilization. Atop that pyramid sits communications. Message drives money and triggers mobilization. Devoid of a compelling message to spur their use, the most advanced web tools will lie fallow. The impetus to use technology is always external to the technology; the impulse to connect and contribute begins with the inspiration to do so and the inspiration derives from the message.

Notwithstanding that hierarchy, the wave of Internet acclamation in the aftermath of the 2008 election has been focused primarily on mobilization and money, on networking tools and techniques, their effect on governance, and on the medium’s capacity to generate eye-popping revenue. Less noted is the impact of the ever-growing online commentariat whose pointed opinions shape our worldview and whose influence on the 2008 election was nothing short of decretive.