"Gate-crashing" Markos to write for Newsweek

Via Huffington Post

Score one for the Netroots! Newsweek has just announced that Markos Moulitsas, namesake and founder of the Daily Kos website, will be a contributor for the mag's 2008 election coverage.

I wish I could think of something to say, but I seem to have sprained some sort of irony-related muscle.

More bannings etc.

I haven't kept this blog up to date. Too busy working to "put food on my family", and doing the "save the world" stuff when I can. But in my peripheral vision, I've been aware that Blogmart is still the antithesis of what I thought I was signing on for when I started to become more politically active. But high profile individuals still frequently choose that blog as their soapbox for "netroots outreach".

Long story short, I will, to the extent that I can find the time, continue to post relevant links here.

Two Peace Activists Banned From Daily Kos by shergald
Memo to DKos: Time to End the Blogosphere's Stoning by liberalamerican
My Initial Response to Being Banned By Markos Moulitsas from Daily Kos by: Maryscott O'Connor
BREAKING: Markos Upholds Ban on MSOC by: Maryscott O'Connor
Through A Glass, Darkly by: Maryscott O'Connor

When bloggers hook up

I need to go to work right now, so I don't have time to formulate a full post on this. Weekends are short, so I don't know how soon I'll be able to get back to it. But I wanted to point out a couple more posts in addition to the one I linked last night. (Please check that one out, as there's been a lot more discussion. Demetrius is my husband, BTW, for anyone who doesn't know.)

What Edwards and the bloggers might teach us

The author said this in the comments:

kingmakers like to get paid. they may not know it when they start, but learn soon enough. witness kos' support of a dlc candidate after railing against the dlc for a year. the difference -- money.

the problem, i think, is that bloggers begin to self-censor the closer they get to the party and to candidates -- and their money. in fact, it's the same ordeal that statehouse reporters face. if they write the real story, their sources dry up. if they don't, their credibility dries up.

that's why i think the kingmaker role is antithetical to the partisan audience of most blogs.

what does work, however, is the blog as executioner meme. taking out pols that stray too far from the party line.

there's an old saying that i'm gonna mangle here, but it holds -- 99% of the evil in the world is done for a paycheck.

And another post, from Writes Like She Talks: When Bloggers hookup: getting hired, getting sponsored, getting snookered, getting lost

Hope this can spur some futher discussion.

Jon Swift interview with Bloggasm

Just found out about this via skippy:

Interview with Jon Swift

Jon Swift: I think I was actually the first blogger to question the notion of Amnesty Day. All of the other posts I could find before I wrote my post talked about what a great idea it was to pare down blogrolls to a list of the blogs that are on everyone else’s blogroll. I’m afraid that if Atrios declared Shoot Yourself in the Foot Day we might have a lot of liberal bloggers limping around right now. None dared even link to my piece until skippy took up the cause and then suddenly it was as if people had permission to say the emperor was very skimpily attired. I have had a liberal blogrolling policy — which is that I will blogroll anyone who blogrolls me — for quite a while and I was surprised that it hadn’t caught on before. Conservative bloggers have already shown they can push quite a few blogs onto the A-List. They not only have larger, more inclusive blogrolls on average, they have a number of communities that are powered by Blogrolling.com that instantly give new bloggers hundreds of links. Liberals have virtually none. They also participate in Blog Carnivals and Open Trackback parties more than liberal bloggers. So far Atrios and Kos have responded quite defensively to the rumbling voices of dissent. As I pointed out in a comment to Kos’ recent post about the issue, “With great power comes great responsibility and there is always a danger that one will become aloof and out of touch, though I can’t think of any examples of that at the moment among our present political leaders.”

I don't tend to have a problem speaking out about the "emperor", by the way.



I just tend to be a little behind the times with the news of the day. So many blogs, so little time. I sometimes have to see the same post topics come up repeatedly, over the course of a number of days, before my curiosity is piqued enough that I say "Okay, who *is* this Gannon/Guckert guy everybody seems to be talking about?" Or "What is this 'Fitzmas' of which you speak?"

A couple new posts

Jacta Alea Est: The Die Is Cast by Maryscott O'Connor

So Kos Is Wrong. It's Our Job To Be Bigger by Paul Rosenberg

On Banning, and Thanks to Maryscott by Nonpartisan

Banned at DailyKos

By pyrrho

The funny thing is that, firstly, the privs started dissappearing before the ratings appeared, and when they appeared, they were largely in a counter-rant of mine (here) defending myself against BTD saying peeder and hrh are my heroes. The ironic thing is that there are many people there less friendly to alleged Democratic Ideals than myself, and that no one would deny that. So what else was so important?

I have criticized dkos MANY times, and praised it. This time... I said we could not have political fealty to corporations. We can rely on them as tools, but not have political allegience to them. Such allegience is wrong if given to a corporation, it makes you corporationist, not a good philosophy, at least, not for democracies.

Click here for the rest.

More on the business of blogging

By pyrrho:

DailyKos is a business. When I claim not to hate it, I'm told I really do (e.g. by cookiebear). To me there is some level of emotional dysfunction in that accusation because in my world I am not EVEN ASKED to be "loyal" to PRIVATE BUSINESSES.

My relationship with private businesses is not like my relationship with my family, my nation, my species. If I'm working for that company, I do have a great deal of loyalty, but EVEN THEN, not the sort one has to a nation or cause.

I like dailykos, I think it's still quite useful business, but it's impossible for me to have political loyalty to an organization in which I HAVE NO SAY.

Click to read the rest.

Blogging about blogrolling

From If I Ran the Zoo:

What's at stake here is the egalitarian and democratic nature of the blogosphere. If traffic and linkage are concentrated among a relatively few extremely popular blogs, then the vast majority are effectively shut out of the conversation. It is a basic liberal belief that great success carries with it the duty to extend opportunity to others; that's the duty that, as some see it, Atrios and others fail to live up to. As Jon Swift observes, the right blogosphere is actually much more liberal about linking to smaller blogs than the liberal side.

Click here for the rest.

Blogdom as high school

Good post by liberalamerican at My Left Wing. In part...

In his "shunning" post kos was being his usual disingenuous self when he said, "Despite popular misconceptions, a blogroll link isn't a major source of traffic, not even one on Daily Kos. It won't make or break a site." It may or may not be a source of traffic (more on that in a minute), BUT blogrolls can increase a Technorati rank, if you play them right. Remember, it's not how many links you have, but how many link to you.

Every blogger knows the drill: you send this letter, trying not to, as Atrios condescendingly puts it, sound like a "blog whore," saying you have posted a link to their site and will they do the same for you. Most of the time the Big Dogs will blow you off and you get nothing in return, but some people keep listing them anyway. According to Technorati, Daily Kos has 81,277 links from 1,086 blogs, ranking it 14th. Eschaton has 14,166 links from 2,616 blogs ranking it 182d.

Neither site has a blogroll even close to being in the thousands, but thousands of bloggers link TO them. I have seen many of these links from little blogs that for some reason feel compelled to put kos on their blog roll. It does them absolutely no good, but it's great for kos.

Read the rest here.

Some thoughts from Brilliant at Breakfast

Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast has this to say about Blogroll Amnesty Day...

But with Kos and Atrios making a big show about "culling the blogroll", and Chris Bowers playing "Mine's Bigger" with the rest of the blogosphere, is this really what it's come to? Is this the Revenge of the Nerds come to fruition? Is this the guys who DIDN'T get laid on prom night finally staking their claim to coolness?

If so, are we going to sit by and take it? Are we going to just toil away while guys like Atrios and Kos and Chris Bowers define the rules and brand the rest of us as useless?

I don't know about you, but all this is making me feel just a wee tad Norma Rae here.

Fuck the big boys. They're the blogospheric equivalent of the Washington pundits who think they're better than bloggers because they get invited to the right parties and of the Democrats who hold fundraisers where they take money from corporations. We hold bake sales and support our candidates twenty-five bucks at a time. What's hilarious is that most of these guys come out of the 2004 Howard Dean campaign, only a taste of success has made them forget all about people-powered.

So all you progressive bloggers out there who are reading this and are damn sick and tired of these puffed-up assholes thinking they're somehow better than you are and that they decide who gets read and who doesn't, show yourselves in the comments. Let's hear your ideas for how we can help each other. And if you're planning to go to Yearly Kos in August, start thinking about how we can use that conference to brainstorm about where we go from here.

Shaping "the blogosphere we want"

Paul Rosenberg's response (in part) to one of Maryscott O'Connor's recent essays about the blogroll purging...

Setting everything else aside, when Kos decides to "trim" his blogroll, and does so thinking about himself and his site, rather than the political blogosphere as a whole, he is not doing anything to consciously create the blogosphere we need--even if I had no objection to the contents of the blogroll he ended up with.

And, of course if we're not really thinking about consciously shaping the blogosphere we want, how can we possibly be up for consciously shaping the world we want?

"Sweat Equity"

There's a very good post by peeder, who used to work as a contractor for Markos, about the business of blogging. I recommend reading the whole thing, but will share an excerpt from one of his comments here...

Daily Kos has gone very far on sweat equity, but harnessing quality sweat equity requires a discipline of respect, humility, and gratitude. Openly boasting of Bosendorfers and bigscreen TVs insults the volunteer force at some point.

Markos falls short in the areas of "respect, humility, and gratitude"...ya think?

What the heck...

I made a t-shirt.

"My blog was dumped on "Blogroll Amnesty Day"...and I had to pay for my OWN lousy t-shirt!"