Blog Power

by Glenn Greenwald

This achievement by Crooks & Liars is both extremely significant and well-deserved:

A small cluster of power bloggers — focused on politics, blogging and humor — were responsible for the top 100 blog posts for 2006, according to word-of-mouth measurement firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics. . . .

Crooks and Liars' posts on Stephen Colbert's monologue at the White House, and Keith Olbermann commentary on Rumsfeld, were the number 2 and 3 posts, respectively.

Beyond those two posts, posts from C&L also occupied the number 5 position (Olbermann's remarks on President Bush) and the 7 position (Al Gore's SNL would-be "presidential address"). That means that of the 10 most linked-to posts for all of 2006, 4 of them — 40% — came from one blog: C&L. Only one post from a top Bush-loving blog made the list (a Michelle Malkin rant on the Mohammed cartoons).

There are literally millions of blogs now. For one single blog, on its own, to generate 40% of the ten most linked-to posts for the year is a truly remarkable achievement. It is a testament to the uniquely valuable role C&L plays in the blogosphere — not only in providing invaluable video content but, more importantly, in helping to shape the dialogue and agenda for the liberal blogosphere as a whole.

By definition, any blogger who blogs regularly works very hard. But few, if any, work as hard as John Amato does. Maintaining this site is incredibly labor-intensive, and a person would do this only if they were driven by genuine passion to develop a meaningful alternative to our broken national media and rotting Beltway political institutions. The power of the blogosphere — particularly the liberal/anti-Bush blogosphere — is growing inexorably, and C&L (which includes everyone who helps to maintain it) is playing a central role in that development.