With the increasing spread of information technologies and their potential to filter content, some have argued that people
will abandon the reading of dissenting political opinions in favor of material that is closely aligned with their own ideological
position. We test this theory empirically by analyzing—both quantitatively and qualitatively—Web links among the writings
of top conservative and liberal bloggers. Given our use of novel methods, we discuss in detail our sampling and data collection
methodologies. We find that widely read political bloggers are much more likely to link to others who share their political
views. However, we find no increase in this pattern over time. We also analyze the content of the links and find that while
many of the links are based on straw-man arguments, bloggers across the political spectrum also address each others’ writing
substantively, both in agreement and disagreement.
Keywords Blogs - Bloggers - Communication - Fragmentation - Ideology - Internet - Polarization - Political communication - Web