On the political contextualisation of weblogs…

I’m really interested in the attempts to collate and analyse webloggers’ responses to The Political Compass, which is doing another one of its periodic rounds across webloggia. I first posted about it a little under two and a half years ago – since when (you may be interested to know) I have become fractionally more left-wing (-1.25 on the x-axis rather than 1.23) and slightly less libertarian (-5.03 on the y-axis rather than -6.86). I don’t know whether that’s a function of age, cynicism or pragmatism, but it’s interesting in that it demonstrates that our apparent political dispositions aren’t totally fixed and solid qualities. That’s not a particularly startling revelation for anyone who has watched their parents descend more and more into the decaying pits of Thatcherism/post-Thatcherism over twenty years of political calcification, but it’s interesting to watch it happen to yourself nonetheless…

Anyway, the initial analysis of webloggers behaviour (bearing in mind that they are self-selecting through association and social networks) is providing some really interesting results. There seems to be a clear and distinct clumping/relationship between leftist and centre-leftist ideologies and libertarianism across the blogosphere. There are very few leftish authoritarians. The right-wing, on the other hand, seems much more diffuse – with authoritarian and libertarian tendencies roughly equally split. Whether or not the weblogs marked on the chart are representative of webloggers in general is difficult to say given the small sample size. If it is, anecdotal evidence would seem to suggest that right-wing webloggers talk more about politics, as my general experience of reading political sites is they almost always seem to be right-wing. Which makes you wonder what the left are talking about…

Anyway, at the moment the sample size is ludicrously inadequate but maybe if we can get a few more webloggers to take the test and then feed in their results to the (ugly, unreadable and yet totally compelling) collation form on the analysis site, we might start to get some more useful results. It would be fascinating to start mapping these results back onto geographical areas (particularly across the UK weblogging communities – maybe at London Bloggers?) to see if there are any relationships between where people live and their politics. More interesting still would be to start creating ways of navigating sites via these political axes. I like the idea of providing a mechanism for someone to navigate to another site from mine simply by asking for something, “more libertarian”. Another useful/intriguing approach might be to find ways to contexualise the material on a weblog by connecting a keyword or URL search to these political frameworks. Think how awesome it could be to be able to automatically generate a set of links that would give you representative perspectives from every major political sensibility on any given issue, news story or link. It’s just one example of the kind of contextualising tool I talked about in the Guardian a while back and would fit in really nicely with aggregators like Blogdex and Google News,