Study of blogging in the US campaign --different strategies in the two camps

Over at the Columbia Journalism review they have been looking at the development of the Blogosphere during the US Presidential campaign,a subject that I am sure will be the headline for many dissertations in the coming months.

The study reveals a significanty difference between the two candidates

Barack Obama’s campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site

whereas

John McCain’s campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs—many of which it helped incubate—as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support

Perhaps though this may be the most telling conclusion

Many of the bloggers cross-post content on several Web sites and, in this way, raise the profile of key stories and videos on Google and YouTube. But they mostly link to each other, and while this can be a useful way for like-minded activists to network, this disconnectedness from the rest of the blogosphere “indicates it is not a particularly effective communication strategy, because these sites don’t draw much attention from established bloggers on the left or the right,”