Planting Liberally

This year, there appears to be a wave of right-wing attempts to create a conservative Web 2.0. The idea is to leverage the semantic and social web in favor of conservative causes; the implicit charge is that somehow, the "mainstream" Web 2.0 has a left-wing bias. Primary examples of these efforts include QubeTV, which NewTeeVee discusses today, and Conservapedia. The reaction in the progressive blogosphere to date appears to be a mix of bemusement and surprise, and I think rightly so. If the m.o. of the social networking world is user-generated content and user-moderated promotion, and the result of all that user feedback happens to be left-wing, then conservatives have a problem with the users, not the company which runs the site. It's like complaining that the community billboard at your local coffee shop has too many fliers for vegetarian co-op houses. Moreover, creating conservative social networking sites is a great way to ghetto-ize your cause, since QubeTV is really just a slick way of promoting videos which couldn't cut it on YouTube. Why would those videos be interesting to anyone who's not a conservative? Part of me would like to go along with this collective response, but I wonder if this wave is just another effort to repeat the success of the conservative movement in moving non-ideological news sources to the right. As David Brock pointed out in The Right-Wing Noise Machine, the creation of right-wing newspapers and cable TV shows enabled conservatives to communicate their message while creating the semblance of left-wing bias in largely non-ideological mews sources. Is QubeTV going to try to push YouTube to somehow "tilt to the right"? Will Conservapedia try to lobby for more conservatives among the upper eschelons of Wikipedia volunteer editors? I'm not sure, but it's something to look out for. At the end of the day, I think we're more or less safe. Any attempt to "balance" YouTube or Wikipedia would result in an uproar and, I think, a massive loss in authenticity and authority - which are the coins of the Web 2.0 realm. Still, it's important to keep an eye out to make sure that these ridiculous efforts to balance the semantic and social web remain ridiculous.