RICHARD POE responds to questions about why the Blogosphere tilts rightward. His commentary on the Crabtree piece in the New Statesman is worth excerpting:

Take Crabtree’s own article. Crabtree violated blog etiquette by failing to link to the “right-wing” blogs he condemned. But his conservative rivals did the opposite. They gleefully linked to Crabtree’s Bolshevik rant, the better to ridicule it.

Each “right-wing” blogger courteously provided links, not only to Crabtree’s piece, but to the blog where he found Crabtree’s piece. Thus bloggers can backtrack through a chain of commentary from one blog to the next, and comment on each others’ comments. A hot debate can girdle the globe within hours.

Instead of suppressing Crabtree, conservative bloggers helped publicize him. Not that it will do him any good. Only a handful of fellow leftists will take Crabtree’s polemic seriously. The rest of us will roll on the floor, convulsed by paroxysms of side-splitting, rib-cracking – and, to borrow a phrase from Samizdata.net – “pant-wetting” laughter.

I think that’s the part that really hurts, though “Bolshevik rant” may be a bit of an overstatement. And I think the blogosphere is less rightist than anti-idiotarian, though where the New Statesman is concerned the distinction may be of little consequence.

UPDATE: Paul Musgrave doesn’t like Poe’s piece much. My favorite bit of Paul’s post, though, is this link to the Tom Tomorrow cartoon on blogging that people were talking about last week. I will note, though, that unlike Crabtree, Musgrave links to the object of his criticism.