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The left wing of the blogosphere incorporates a wider range of views than a more centralized model. Their blogs encourage more user participation, present more opinion-related content, and were more likely to rally their readers to action

A new study released in the American Behavioral Scientist, published by SAGE, examined the differences among top political blogs from the right and the left. Researchers Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler analyzed 155 top political blogs from a 2-week period in early August 2008. 

The authors wrote, "The left is more egalitarian in opportunities for speech, more discursive, and more collaborative in managing the sites. The right is more individualistic and hierarchical, with its practice consisting more of pointing to external stories than of engaging in discussion or commentary."

Researchers first determined which blogs represented ideologies from the left and which represented ideologies of the right. They then applied a coding scheme to analyze blog structure, the incorporation of user activity, authorship, calls to action, and overall content from both types of blogs.

Primary authors on the left tended to write more opinion posts, whereas the right-wing blogs tend to write posts that were more concise and relatively brief, the study found.

Of the top 65 higher-ranked blogs, the left incorporated many more calls to action the right, the result revealed. These include appeals to attend political rallies and protests, to participate in letter-writing or phone-calling campaigns, or to donate money

"Users on the left have a more active, productive role, blurring the production-consumption distinction and, through this, increasing the probability that the left wing of the blogosphere incorporates a wider range of views than a more centralized model," they added.