President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
December 16, 2008 10:25 PM UTC
7 Comments
Is impressive. I wonder how that compares to FTS and S2
Combined they get a fraction of Pols’ traffic.
They are different animals altogether. I don’t think any of them are trying to do the same things at all, but measured by traffic, Colorado Pols is way out ahead of those two others, and reasonably huge as far as state blogs go.
It is crushed by the traffic of other Colorado political blogs, however. David Sirota’s sirotablog is bigger, Jeralyn Merritt’s TalkLeft is bigger still, and a monster of a blog moved into Colorado Springs this summer – MichelleMalkin.com
If you weigh not only traffic, but how many other sites quote it and the other things that go into a Technorati.com rating, you’ll find that CoPols right now is only around the 54,000th largest blog out there. Face the State is up around 30,000th largest. And SquareState is way up at around the 20,000th largest spot. So ColoradoPols stands pretty tall because of the lively debate, but kind of off in its own corner because it is not really tied into a larger community.
For reference, TalkLeft is closer to 3,000 and Malkin is currently ranked at #28.
And then fantasy football kicks everyone’s asses.
Comparing blogs that ORIGINATE in Colorado is irrelevant to comparing blogs that are ABOUT Colorado. Political blogs that are only about Colorado (Colorado Pols) are never going to grow to the same size as blogs that talk about national politics but are based in Colorado (Talk Left, etc).
Technorati is also not terribly useful as a ranking tool. If a lot of sites link to a blog, but nobody ever clicks on those links and actually visits that blog (like with Face the State), then who cares? You really can’t argue that Colorado Pols isn’t more influential than Face the State or Square State, no matter what Technorati or another ranking system says. Hell, there are ranking systems that say that minor local Republican blogs are considerably more influential than any of the three already mentioned, which is of course nonsense.
I agree that they don’t compare, but it is also a mistake to try to compare ColoradoPols and Squarestate for the same reason that the target communities are very different. Squarestate is focused on being a blog written by members of the Colorado progressive community, and not a general political audience of a blog like ColoradoPols.
“Influential” is a tricky word. It is not the same as “widely read”. Influences whom? To do what? Depending on how you slice that you can make a really good case that any of those blogs is the most influential.
Take Jefferson County, for instance. During the last reorganization, Squarestate did a multi-part series that drew online comments from several of the people that wound up as party officers. That conversation played a significant roll in the eventual outcome of that race. I am not familiar with an instance where ColoradoPols had that sort of influence on anything in Jefferson County. They are widely read, but they were calling the Lamm/Perlmutter race wrong right up until a week before the election, and I can’t believe that Jason Bane’s Commissioner race wound up the way they would have liked. That kind of influence is not where they shine, but it is the kind of influence that something that talks to a narrower audience, like JeffcoPols, might be able to demonstrate.
Sure, there are other ways you can define influence, and it would be absolutely reasonable to do it in a way that put CoPols on top. I would be interested to hear what you think ColoradoPols most “influential” moment was exactly. I am not saying it isn’t. I am just saying that a lot of it has to do with a blog’s purpose, and different blogs have different purposes.
ColoradoPols has the largest traffic of all the blogs that do exactly what it does. The bigger ones do other things, and the smaller ones do other things. It’s traffic is certainly larger than the ideological blogs FaceTheState and SquareState. Who is most influential, though? You can make a case for any of them, and I bet the folks at ProgressNow (originates in Colorado, about Colorado) will tell you that they think they are kings of that hill.
But that would be comparing coconuts to radiators.
If I had to guess, that would be posting Justin Schaffer’s Facebook page and being the first to point out the mountain in Schaffer’s commercial was Denali, not Pikes Peak. More broadly, keeping the drumbeat going on Schaffer’s scandals set the tone for the Senate campaign and made that perception mainstream in a way ProgressNow and the others didn’t (though they all carried plenty of weight on that front too).
Pols, along with P-Now greatly contributed to Bob Schaffer’s downfall–along with a little help from Bob Schaffer.