Joe Biden led Wonkosphere in buzz per post on Sunday
by WonkoKevin
Joe Biden was only mentioned in 82 liberal blogs yesterday, compared to the 290 liberal blog posts which mentioned Hillary Clinton. Yet Clinton’s overall Wonkosphere liberal buzz share (23%) was not even twice Biden’s (12%). How could Biden’s buzz share be so much relatively higher, per post? It’s because of the way we calculate buzz share, and it demonstrates that Biden is being talked about much more substantively in the posts that do mention him, whereas Clinton is being mentioned (relatively) more in passing. The same perspective is also positive to Romney, Thompson, Edwards, and Obama, and negative to Giuliani and Paul.
From the Wonkosphere About page, Wonkosphere buzz share measures the proportion of buzz for each candidate in all blogs for the 24 hours preceding the latest update. Percentages for each candidate are calculated every four hours. To get the value we first analyze each blog post for each candidate, and score the prominence of the candidate’s name within the post. We sum these prominence scores across all candidates then express their scores as a percent of the total.
Simply put, a candidate can get higher buzz share in three ways: (a) increased number of posts, (b) increased prominence (buzz) per post, and/or (c) decreased number of posts and prominence amongst the other candidates.
A simple way to look at the buzz share percentage generated per post. In Biden’s case, each post generated 0.16 worth of buzz share. Again, this means that over the past 24 hours, Biden was talked about most substantively within the posts he was mentioned in. On the Democratic side, Edwards (0.12) and Obama (0.13) also faired well, while the data indicates that Clinton (0.08) and Dodd (0.07) were talked about much less substantively in the posts they were mentioned in. Overall, liberal bloggers talked about Democratic candidates (0.10 average) more substantively than conservative bloggers talked about Republican candidates (0.08).
On the Republican side, Romney (0.11) and Thompson (0.11) are being talked about more substantively than Huckabee (0.09) and McCain (0.09). The three candidates being mentioned most in passing are Ron Paul (0.05), Giuliani (0.04), and Bill Richardson (0.04).
What the heck happened to Ron Paul’s bloggers? Paul led all Republicans in connservative buzz share in November at 30%, and was at 25% on September and October. Now he’s hovering around 10-15%. The raw number of posts mentioning Paul is slightly down, but the posts themselves don’t carry nearly as much buzz per post as they did before. Why have Paul’s bloggers gone shallow on him?
In other Wonkosphere news, 4-5 day buzz share trends are positive on Thompson and Edwards, and negative on Paul and Clinton.
