Professor Bainbridge questions a perceived lack of conservative influence in the blogosphere:

I have the distinct impression that the Democratic Party sees the liberal blogosphere as being inside the tent, while the Republican Party views the conservative blogosphere as being somewhere between an irrelevance and a minor nuisance. . . . [A]ll of this raises the question of how those of us in the conservative blogosphere can elevate ourselves into the category of genuine problem as opposed to mere nuisances. I'm open to suggestions.

I touched upon these here and here in a discussion of a report by the New Politics Institute. While the report was blatantly self-serving in stating that the blogosphere as a whole is more left than right (basically doctoring its survey to get the results it wanted), they did point out that left-wing blogs have a tendency to use community-building software like Scoop, and that the sites are often not so much "blogs" as aggregations or communities of bloggers. (Indeed, Scoop sites have a tendency to look more like politicized versions of Livejournal or Xanga. While both describe themselves as "blogging" software, much of their usefulness lies in their ability to form communities.)

By aggregating large numbers of internet users in one place, sites like DailyKos muster more political influence simply because they make it easier to find the pulse of a subgroup of the Democratic Party (or at least the extreme left, and there is considerable overlap). They're also much more useful as support tools, because fundraising or campaign support can be organized at a grassroots level at a much lower cost.

To the best of my knowledge, a Scoop-style site of Kos-level prominence doesn't yet exist, although there's probably considerable room for such a site if it were to attract sufficient talent. Imagine if The Volokh Conspiracy were to move towards a Scoop-style community, or even better, if some of the conservative law professors like Bainbridge or the Federalist Society were to start one.

Now if someone wanted to start one and needed a sysadmin....

(Post updated, embarassingly, to correct the Bainbridge quote, although there's no substantial difference. (I forgot the ellipses.) I should also point out that the only reason I'm surprised by Prof. Bainbridge not jumping to an institutional analysis of how blogs are structured is because I've been reading a lot of his corporate law writing recently for a different project. As a result, it's natural in my mind that the first thing he should do when looking at differential influence in the blogosphere is build a model explaining it. This is more my tunnel-vision, however, and just shows how one's judgment can be skewed by "knowing" someone primarily through their published work.

That does lead me to wonder, however, if someone who only read Bainbridge on Wine might expect Bainbridge would first hypothesize a merlot/chardonnay split between liberal and conservative blogs. . . .)