For anyone interested in the political consequences of blogging, this paper by George Washington University political scientists Henry Farrell, Eric Lawrence, and John Sides is worth a read. Using a very large sample of 16,145 Americans who use blogs, drawn from the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, the authors address three main questions. First, do blog users only read material with which they already agree (e.g. do conservatives only consume right-leaning blogs and liberals read liberal blogs)? The paper finds a strong relationship between users’ ideological and partisan preferences and their online reading habits. Farrell and his colleagues write: