Our own Patrick Ruffini made some headlines a couple of days ago with an extremely interesting post.  Delving into the vicissitudes of the Sitemeter counting system, Patrick estimated that Sitemeter overstates the amount of Daily Kos traffic by roughly 60% and that the actual number of Daily Kos readers is closer to a 250,000/day than the much ballyhooed figure of 600,000 a day.

You might have expected Patrick’s post to provoke at least a modicum of outrage from the Kossacks.  Au contraire, the Kossacks greeted his widely linked conclusions with an uncustomary silence.  Perhaps the reason for their silence can be found in this Daily Kos diary from August 25.  The diarist pointed out some poorly known features of the Sitemeter measuring system:

(Unique visitors) is not a count of unique daily visits; it is actually unique visitors every 30 minutes. Site Meter explains its algorithm is this way: "Site Meter defines a 'visit' as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.  In other words, if you click to dKos after being idle or absent for at least 30 minutes, you are counted as a new visitor.

The diarist went on to infer that the real number of unique visitors a day to the Daily Kos is closer to 100,000 than the more widely publicized figures of 500,000 – 600,000.  Here’s the kicker – rather than scold the Diarist for letting the cat out of the bag, the commenters praised him/her/it for his/her/its perspicacity.  One commenter tellingly wrote,

I have often wondered how my own DKos habits are counted.  I know that many days I have refreshed the front page 20 or 30 times, plus visited many diaries.  Does that continuous a usage constitute only one hit on the site, because it never expired, so to speak, or is every 30 minutes that I on the site I get counted anew?

Would make a big difference, and I'm quite sure I am not the only Kossak who puts in that level of involvement, even if it is only some of the time.

I'm perfectly happy with the rep of "half a million hits a day" that DKos has had for quite a while now, if it works to be a measure of our power.

So what can we glean from this analysis, aside from the fact that Daily Kos commenters are barely literate?  For the sake of the advertisers paying to place their wares on any site (including ours), I would figure it doesn’t mean much.  Then again, I know nothing about advertising and like it that way.  Still, I’m assuming that Chevrolet doesn’t run that Mellencamp song during every timeout of every football game based on the calculation that a whole new set of viewers sees each ad.  In other words, for internet advertisers, page-views rather than so-called unique visitors should be the real bogey.

But what of politicians and political parties? Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that there are only 100,000 Kossacks out there.  That assumption would beg the inference that there are probably 300 Daily Kos readers in Iowa and a few more than that number in New Hampshire.  Are the Democrats smart in spending so much time, energy and money cultivating such a paltry constituency?

The question answers itself.  But the answer begs another question – why do they spend so much time catering to what is in essence a tiny fringe movement?  The American Federation of Teachers has roughly 1.4 million members who practice a more rigid political orthodoxy than the Daily Kos does, what with Markos’ intellectually incoherent blatherings about Libertarian Democrats.  In other words, the teachers are more numerous and would be easier to please. And yet the Democrats don’t spend a fraction of the energy appeasing the teachers as they do the Nutroots.

Again, why?  The simplest answer is that the people who run Democratic presidential campaigns aren’t that bright.  John Edwards has tacked wildly to the left in the past three years, obviously hoping to emulate Howard Dean’s runaway success story.  Barack Obama’s supporters caterwaul about Obama building a movement, while wondering why his “movement” fails to register in the polls.  Only Hillary Clinton has shown a measure of restraint in courting the Nutroots.  And what do you know?  She’s the smartest and shrewdest candidate in the field.

For another explanation, look to Markos Moulitsas.  When people ask me how I advanced in the blogging world, I tell them it was one part putting out decent stuff and one part precisely targeted self-promotion.  Credit where it’s due – Markos is the shrewdest self-promoter on the internet.  With smoke, mirrors and the world’s most perfect echo-chamber, he has convinced a major political party that he leads a massive movement of millions. In truth, he does have enough muscle to influence a handful of congressional races.  Jon Tester and Jim Webb will testify to that.  So will Joe Lieberman.  But on the presidential level, he and his movement aren’t a factor. 

But don’t tell the Democratic candidates that.  They’ll gladly follow the Daily Kos’ whopping readership beyond the gates of lunacy while fearing the massiveness of the online movement. 

Because of factors that have nothing to do with the blogosphere, 2008 will be an awful year for Republicans.  But here’s the good news - defeat is an orphan, victory has a thousand parents.  No one will be more poised to take credit for the Democrats’ success in ’08 than the Nutroots.  Their excesses, and the Democrats’ catering to those excesses, will someday do more damage to their party than Republican foul-ups of the past decade have done to ours.

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