Just out of curiosity, are we going to be reading these conservatives-still-trail-liberals-online articles in 2012? 2015? 2020? It's just astonishing to me that nearly seven years (which is what, 70 years in Internet time?), the conservative blogosphere still badly trails the left online, and even more incredibly, it appears to be making no serious gains.

How is it that a major major political movement in this country has managed to be caught so off-guard for so long about a media revolution that everyone else seems to have picked up by now?

Here's my take from Bloggers On The Bus:

In truth, the two blogospheres had distinctly different DNA's because they were born into different political environments. In the late 1990's and early 2000's conservatives had already established their own alternative, movement-based media (aka the Republican Noise Machine.) Built around talk radio, Fox News and partisan print outlets, they were part of a political movement first, and part of the media landscape second. Meaning, they had a clear allegiance to the GOP and they eagerly embraced propaganda; endlessly repeating ideas, phrases, and images.

So when the Internet began to emerge as a political force at the turn of the decade, it wasn't as if a vacuum existed among conservatives in terms of political discourse. They already had an abundance of established outlets where their voices could be heard and promoted. That's one reason they were slower to embrace the Internet.

Consequently, when the conservative blogosphere matured, it did so within the framework of the established, GOP-friendly alternative media system. Right-wing bloggers like Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt simply joined in the same conversations that were already being heard on talk radio, and on Fox News and in the pages of the Weekly Standard. Bloggers brought another microphone to an already crowded GOP media table and became an appendage of talk radio. They represented another lineup of pundits and commentators. They embraced the old fashion model of experts dispensing wisdom to their loyal readers.

For years, many of the major conservative blogs didn't even allow readers to post comments, which meant the conversation flowed from the blogger (i.e. from the pundit) to the reader. The interaction remained limited, as was the sense of shared community. Consequently, because lots of prominent conservative bloggers showed no interest in leading a larger movement that meant comparatively little organizing, fundraising or policy initiatives sprang from the conservative blogs. After all, that's what well-funded conservative think tanks were for.

Of course, there's another reason the Rightroots movement remains stagnant: It's led by dopes.