The Two Blogospheres

One interesting subject I hadn't really given much thought to until I got a question about it at the NAHJ panel in Texas is the contrasting cultural norms of the liberal and conservative (or, perhaps more accurately, the hawkish and dovish) blogospheres. There are a lot of aspects of this and, interestingly, I think we're close enough to the origins that we can identify specific causes:

• Liberal sites are more oriented toward comments and community-building than are conservative ones. This seems to have a twofold origin, one being that Atrios enabled comments early on and Glenn Reynolds never did. Then, Markos pioneered the Scoop/community format. Now it's considered bad form on the left to not have a comments section.
• Semi-paradoxically, the liberal blogosphere is considerably more elitist than is the conservosphere. There's much less self-conscious promotion of small sites by the authors of bigger ones. The origin here, I think, is the difference between Andrew Sullivan (who was much more clearly on the right at the time) and Josh Marshall in the early days. Andrew was a real blog enthusiast/evangelist and Josh wasn't. Since both of them are/were "real" journalists their practices became normative of what a serious enterprise would be like, with Sullivan-emulators seeing promotion of the blogosphere per se as part of their mission while Marshall-emulators sought to stay aloof from the rabble. Then the dawn of dKos and other community-oriented sites have wound up provided an alternative mechanism of inclusion for liberal bloggers and readers.
• I'm less certain that this is really true, but I think you see different kinds of viciousness from the left and the right. Your rightwingers are much more likely to say something substantively scummy about someone else -- flinging around casual accusations of treason and so forth. Your leftwingers, by contrast, are much more likely to engage in workaday meanness -- name-calling and so forth. This stems, I think, from the stylistic dichotomy between Atrios and Instapundit. Glenn's a really master of the artfully worded slander -- "they're not anti-war, they're on the other side" and so forth -- while Duncan has a much blunter approach -- "InstaHack," etc.

There are other differences, of course, that are more tied to macro-level differences in the worldview of the prosperous, well-educated branch of American conservatism and the prosperous, well-educated branch of American liberalism, but those three are all sociological quirks that I think have fairly micro-level origins that have no become widely entrenched.