The top blog in the progressive blog neighborhood is Dailykos, the top one in the conservative blog neighborhood is Michelle Malkin. (If we’re talking site traffic alone, Huffington Post is #1, but that also has a ton of authors, and plenty of people visiting it for non-political news.) Kos went to Northern Illinois University, which isn’t *exactly* Ivy-caliber. Malkin went to Oberlin, which (as a fellow alum) I’d love to describe as Ivy-caliber, but it should be noted that everyone who attended Oberlin got rejected by Brown.

More to the point, there’s a lot of mobility *within* a community blog like dailykos. We saw that with fivethirtyeight.com, one of the most interesting case examples from this cycle. The two primary authors were anonymous posters on dailykos, posting under the screennames “poblano” and “pocket nines.” Poblano (Nate Silver) attracted an audience based on his outstanding predictive accuracy, got impressed with pocket nines, and they launched their own site, eventually revealing their identities.

Now that hardly suggests that the blogosphere is an egalitarian environment where anyone can attract an audience of millions. But it does point out some important variance in the basic “preferential attachment” argument. Blog structure can have a HUGE impact on outcomes. If you have a community site like DailyKos as your power-law hub, then that means talented latecomers can still rise through the ranks. An individual site like Malkin or Instapundit, meanwhile, offers far less potential mobility. And that may provide the roots of an explanation of why the progressives have developed such a huge lead in online infrastructure. “Googlearchy” isn’t so menacing if the beneficiary of preferential attachment allows for in-site mobility.