(via Instapundit)  Richard Poe comes to the scene with his response to the James Crabtree's (as well as a host of others) lament that so much of the blogosphere consisted of libertarian / right-wingers.

Richard starts with a small discussion of the dynamics of "consensus" blogging opinions.   (consensus is probably WAY too strong of a word)

"So what?" some readers may ask. "Why should I waste time plowing through the amateur punditry of a gaggle of lovelorn techno-geeks?"

Ah, but that’s the beauty of blogging. The system is self-selecting. The worst blogs sink to the bottom. No one sees them. The best blogs rise to the top, borne aloft by the sheer number of bloggers who link to them.

Poe spends most of his article describing the process of debate / contribution that bloggers engage in and how that leads to a certain crispness in analysis (which presumably then leads to a more "conservative" viewpoint ;-) 

I would have liked to have seen Richard spend more analyzing the primordial ooze from which blogging springs and how that shapes the (conservative/libertarian) culture of the blogdom.

IMO, the single biggest reason that blogging tends to have a right-ist/libertarian feel is that most bloggers have (real) full time jobs.   Unlike many members of the Lefty media / poli sci elite, bloggers tend to be individuals who are generally direct beneficiaries / contributors to the socio-economic system. 

The invisible hand is very visible to many a blogger and the Freedom meme tends to suit us quite well.  We often bear direct witness to the phenomenal amount of voluntary, self-motivated, human interaction that culminates in the construction of an Airplane, an Operating System, making a car run, etc.

Our livelihoods are far more directly impacted by (and contribute towards) GDP than many Left-ists.   The degrees of removal from the sytem held by many of the leftist elite, makes it a little easier to lambast the system and, as Victor Davis Hanson points out, even makes it possible to hold themselves a little higher than those who live so close to economic life.  

Many lefty's secretly have an intrinsic disdain for arm-chair political pundits in the general population.   These folks have opinions that not only matter (cuz they vote!) but are often correct ("I studied the problems of economic advancement for 8 yrs in my PhD thesis, what have you done?" vs. "I helped build a successful product") relative to their "more educated" lefty counterparts.

There are MANY real life world-of-work lessons that directly circle back and shape my political opinions.   For example, Steven Den Beste's recent post on the cell protocol-wars contains lessons which are eminently applicable to the general political world.   Lesson 1, of course, is that government appointed technocrats are fallable and potentially unnecessary.  This lesson is difficult to advocate, of course, if you're a full-time government technocrat.

Depth of analysis afforded in web-based information.   Blogging, the Web, and the Internet are all exceptionally right brained / analytical activities with info-hierarchies a very natural phenomena.    In lefty media, it's very easy to say "Corp X's support of Pesticide Y will cause 200 new cancer cases".  In the blogosphere, this statement is amended and hyperlinked to say that "Pesticide Y will save 4M children from Malaria while only causing ~200 new cancer cases over a 10 yr period."  

The "liveness" of the underlying information model contributes greatly towards providing high fidelity abstractions in blogosphere.   By contrast, the "snapshot / waterfall" flow of information in more traditional media allows lower fidelity abstractions ("corp X causes cancer!") to slip through the cracks more easily and cause greater, emotional waves.

Bloggers tend to be Software / Technology folks who in turn tend to be Libertarian.   The libertarianism rampant in Geekdom is very well documented.  A book from a couple years ago -- Cyberselfish -- provides ample addition data.   At a deeper level, many IT folk, as a natural element of their career paths, are well accustomed to thinking in abstractions, seeing how that last bug can sometimes shift the high level architecture, etc.    Within the Internet, in particular, thousands of consistent protocol / architectural design threads espouse software concepts such as de-centralization, loose coupling, architectural resilience, etc. which in turn often have social/political analogs.

Alienation with liberal, mainstream media driving us to blog.  An issue that Crabtree mentions in his original article, is a core driver for me at least.  Crabtree puts it as:

The right would argue that it had nowhere else to go. It sees itself as the victim of a vast, left-wing media conspiracy. Because it is barred from the mainstream print media (not true, but play along), it seeks "underground" new media.

The distributed nature of blogging helps bypass the Cannon of publishing world.   Poe spends a fair amount of textspace dissecting this issue:

... it is physically impossible for new media to do what old media did – that is, to shove unpopular ideas down peoples’ throats and pretend that the audience likes it.

Such tactics simply don’t work in the blogosphere.

When people get a chance to speak without censorship, they say things you would never hear on CNN or NBC. They vent their contempt for the Left, and express their resentment of Big Media for pushing leftist ideas.

More directly, I'd indict that the editorial review process of mainstream media.   It intrinsically enforces a "politeness" towards conventional wisdom as an article/meme travels up each level in the org chart.

---