Apropos my previous post about the Chicago public employee furlough, Aaron Brazell tweets about a Maryland judge ruling that state furloughs violate the U.S. Constitution.   He links to a WaPo recap:

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Prince George’s County violated the U.S. Constitution when it furloughed 5,900 workers in the last fiscal year, a decision that could force the county to repay millions in wages in the midst of a crippling economic downturn.

The ruling, which the county plans to appeal, has the potential to upend a key Prince George’s strategy for combating deficits. A county spokesman said in a statement that the decision would result in “massive layoffs” if it stands.

“As a result of this [economic] crisis, the county made a difficult decision to furlough its employees for 10 days, saving $17 million,” James P. Keary, spokesman for County Executive Jack B. Johnson (D), said in the statement. “The court has substituted its judgment without acknowledging the economic challenges facing the country. . . . In order to protect their jobs and the lives of employees and their families we will be filing an appeal to remedy this irresponsible decision.”

But U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr. wrote that although he is mindful that local governments are facing financial challenges “in the midst of a global recession,” officials could have turned to other “more moderate alternatives” to trim the budget.

“Although the County suggests to the Court that it faced dire circumstances and had no other reasonable alternatives, the record suggests otherwise and the County’s actions resemble trappings of doing that which was politically expedient,” Williams wrote in his 43-page opinion.

After reading the piece, I had a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment.  The Constitution is pretty short and I’ve not only read it and studied it, I’ve taught courses about it.  I couldn’t recall anything in the document that seemed remotely related to furloughs.

One has to read far down into the piece to get this:

In his opinion, Williams sided with the unions on one of three counts, finding that the county violated the contract clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bars states from passing laws “impairing the obligation of contracts.”

The furloughs reduced employees’ “salaries/wages and hours,” which were guaranteed under contracts “not subject to unilateral adjustment by the County,” Williams wrote. “To find otherwise would render the contracts virtually meaningless.”

Ah.  That actually makes some sense.    The Contracts Clause (Article I, Section 10, Clause 1) says:

No State shall … pass any … Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts.

That’s the entirety of the section. As always, FindLaw’s Annotated Constitution is the go-to resource for a quick synopsis of the judicial findings related to the provision.  The murkiness of the law here shows it to be perhaps the most poorly crafted bit of the Constitution.  Very quickly, the Supreme Court ruled that “No law” does not in fact mean no law.  (My undergraduate ConLaw prof, Dr. Hope Davis, suggested that the Framers should have written “No law, damn it” to be more clear.)

I don’t have any specific knowledge of the contract between Maryland/PG County and its workers and presume that Judge Williams’ ruling is correct.  (Note: In the eyes of the law, cities and counties are mere instruments of the states and their actions are considered that of their state government for the purposes of Constitutional interpretation.)   To show how hard his job was, consider just this snippet of summary from FindLaw:

Also, an express contract between the State and an individual for the performance of specific services falls within the protection of the Constitution. Thus, a contract made by the governor pursuant to a statute authorizing the appointment of a commissioner to conduct, over a period of years, a geological, mineralogical, and agricultural survey of the State, for which a definite sum had been authorized, was held to have been impaired by repeal of the statute. But a resolution of a local board of education reducing teachers’ salaries for the school year 1933-1934, pursuant to an act of the legislature authorizing such action, was held not to impair the contract of a teacher who, having served three years, was by earlier legislation exempt from having his salary reduced except for inefficiency or misconduct. Similarly, it was held that an Illinois statute that reduced the annuity payable to retired teachers under an earlier act did not violate the contracts clause, since it had not been the intention of the earlier act to propose a contract but only to put into effect a general policy. On the other hand, the right of one, who had become a ‘permanent teacher” under the Indiana Teachers Tenure Act of 1927, to continued employment was held to be contractual and to have been impaired by the repeal in 1933 of the earlier act. 

Sheesh.

UPDATE: I should note that, for the purposes of political science courses (vice law schools) the focus on the Contracts Clause is on government’s power.   Mostly, then, we looked at a handful of cases that looked at the ability of a state to take action that had the effect of abrogating a private contract.  That states can’t “impair” contracts, apparently even implied contracts, they make with individuals is an interesting side story.

Aaron Brazell passes along word that DC and Baltimore are the most dangerous driving cities, as calculated by Allstate Insurance.  Bengt Havorson has the list:

The Safest Driving Top Ten

1. Sioux Falls, SD
2. Fort Collins, CO
3. Chattanooga, TN
4. Cedar Rapids, IA
5. Knoxville, TN
6. Fort Wayne, IN
7. Lexington-Fayette, KY
8. Eugene, OR
9. Boise, ID
10. Colorado Springs, CO

Bottom of the List – Riskiest Driving Cities

1. Washington, D.C.
2. Baltimore, MD
3. Glendale, CA
4. Hartford, CT
5. Newark, NJ
6. Philadelphia, PA
7. Elizabeth, NJ
8. Providence, RI
9. San Francisco, CA
10. Los Angeles, CA

I’ve lived and driven in Chattanooga and now live in the DC suburbs and commute into the city most days.  While I found both aggravating, mostly because constant construction projects added to traffic congestion, there’s not much doubt in my mind that DC is a worse place to drive.

Looking at how these are calculated, though, I’m a bit dubious.

To arrive at its lists, Allstate, which has about 11.3 percent of U.S. auto-insurance policies, analyzed its claim data for all collisions resulting in property damage claims. To help reduce the chances of influences like weather or construction, Allstate looked at a period of two years from January 2006 to December 2007. The figures were calculated toward “average years between collision” for drivers, and though they might represent an element of relative risk they’re not being used to determine rates.

Let’s presume that Allstate has representative policy holdings across the states.  Wouldn’t “accidents per mile driven” or “accidents per hour driven” by more useful than “years between accidents”?

UPDATE:  Steve Bainbridge thinks it may be no coincidence that DC is both the most dangerous city to drive in and that “DC also has more red light and speed cameras than almost any metro area in the country. Indeed, DC has nearly 10% of all the traffic cameras in the United States.”

Meanwhile, Stacy McCain has some, um, interesting suggestions on how to solve the problem.

Aaron Brazell argues that, with the advent of instant-reporting of rumor via Twitter and other social media, the mainstream press has fallen behind.  He cites yesterday’s Steve McNair murder, the false rumors that Jeff Goldblum had died, and Michael Jackson’s death.

He laments that, while the McNair news broke on two Nashville stations but “It was a long time (30 minutes or so) before national media picked it up. ESPN, the Worldwide Leader in Sports by their own slogan, didn’t have it. No one did. We were left gasping for more. Is the rumor true? Can anyone confirm? Can police confirm?”

Major media got a little jittery in the past. After 9/11. With other reports that turned into an overcompensation. Fact is, major media can safely report on a rumor as long as it is billed as such. No one has to say that this is confirmed. But people want to know. We get our news on the internet.

We find out about things happening in Iran via Twitter. We find out about Michael Jackson dying… on Twitter. We read blogs that deal with Sarah Palin’s awkwardly bizarre resignation at Alaska governor. We’re not watching your TV stations. We’re not in Nashville. Welcome to the global economy.

Report the damn news and report it as a rumor to hedge your bets. But report the news.

Because I was out and about with the family yesterday, I first saw the news of McNair’s death at YahooNews a half hour or so after it broke nationally and blogged my instant reaction immediately.

I saw reports that Michael Jackson died on Twitter and frantically searched for confirmation.  I did a Breaking News blog post reporting that 1) LA Times had Jackson hospitalized and that 2) several reports that he was dead, all sourced to TMZ, were out.  I updated it shortly thereafter with news that multiple legitimate sources were confirming.

(I saw the reports of Goldblum’s death on Twitter, too, but they were debunked in near-real-time.)

With rare exception, I prefer that the mainstream press report known facts rather than rumors.

People seeing rumors of Jackson’s death on Twitter or TMZ who much cared were presumably searching for confirmation on their own just as I was.  Otherwise, I’m not sure what harm is done to the collective pool of knowledge by having it reported that Jackson was rushed to the hospital — a known fact — and waiting 30 minutes or an hour or so to report that he was dead once that was confirmed.  Conversely, falsely reporting that someone has died has serious consequences.

The McNair story is slowly unfolding as a bizarre soap opera, with alternate reports of murder-suicide and double homicide.  While McNair was undoubtedly an important figure in the world of sports and his murder in the prime of life constitutes breaking news in Nashville and Baltimore (where he played professionally) and for sports pages, I’m not sure what harm there is in taking 30 minutes to gather facts on such a sensitive story.

Indeed, the Goldblum rumor provides a classic cautionary tale.  I for one am rather glad that false reports of Goldblum’s death weren’t flashed on the crawl of every TV show in America.

Like Aaron, I’m a news junkie.  I want my information now.  But unconfirmed rumor is not news; it’s gossip.  If TMZ is wrong about Jackson’s death, nobody will much care; it’s a gossip rag.  If the LAT gets it wrong, though, it loses credibility as a news organization.

There are certainly times when reporting speculation is required.  If, for example, there were reports about an attempt on the life of the president, it’s a national crisis that demands instant reporting.  There were all manner of false reports, for example, when President Reagan was shot, notably the reporting that James Brady had been killed when it turned out he was just horribly wounded.  Similarly, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks demanded 24/7 wall-to-wall coverage and reporting of “facts” as they came in.

Rumors that pop singers and retired athletes have died, however, can go unreported for a few minutes while reporters do some rudimentary fact checking.

Photo by Flickr user Joost Strootman under Creative Commons license.

Here we go again:  The government is looking to get into the business of regulating blogs, reports AP’s Deborah Yao.

Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon. What some fail to realize, though, is that such reviews can be tainted: Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all.

The practice has grown to the degree that the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest.

At OTB, we mark even rather obvious advertisements as “advertisements.”  People are still apparently confused, as I’ll get the occasional comment (and see many at other blogs) questioning how we could write one thing and yet be endorsing some conflicting product/candidate/cause on the sidebar.

Further, Yao is taking a handful of cases — some of which I suspect are apocryphal — and generalizing.  The “trips to Europe” thing is almost certainly the BlogAds/Dutch Tourism Board trip that several of us participated in three years ago.  Despite the fact that the very conditions of the offer required full disclosure and that none of us regularly wrote about Holland, this somehow offended the ethical sensibilities of journalists and continues to stick in their craws.

I occasionally get offers to write posts — or publish posts others have written — for money.  I’ve always declined.  But the free laptop and $500 gift cards and “even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post” that Yao whines about are mythological or so incredibly rare as to be meaningless.  The number of blogs on which a 200-word post would be worth “thousands of dollars” would not require the use of both hands to count.   (Advertisers:  If you disagree, please contact me.  I don’t need a new laptop but for enough thousands I’ll be happy to extol the virtues of Viagra, Online Poker, or Ron Paul.  I’ll need a couple extra thousands on the last.)

It would be the first time the FTC tries to patrol systematically what bloggers say and do online. The common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight.

Seriously?  That’s just insane.  In the interests of full disclosure:  Any link on OTB that offers to sell you a product is some sort of advertisement.  This is a blog, not a store.

“If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk,” said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC’s division of advertising practices. “Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they’re saying, that’s information a consumer should know.”

How, precisely, would this work in practice?  At a store, I pretty much presume anyone trying to sell me something is an employee of the store, even if they’re not wearing a name badge of some sort.  Online, however, isn’t caveat emptor the obvious rule?

The guidelines also would bring uniformity to a community that has shunned that.

As blogging rises in importance and sophistication, it has taken on characteristics of community journalism — but without consensus on the types of ethical practices typically found in traditional media.  Journalists who work for newspapers and broadcasters are held accountable by their employers, and they generally cannot receive payments from marketers and must return free products after they finish reviewing them.  The blogosphere is quite different. “Rules are set by the individuals who create the blog,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “Some people will accept payments and free gifts, and some people won’t. There’s no established norm yet.”

But journalists employed by someone else get paid.   That’s the nature of employment.  Independent bloggers, by contrast, are entrepreneurs.  Actually, most make no money or barely cover expenses, making them, in effect, hobbyists.

Even beyond that, the notion of journalistic purity vs. blogospheric greed is nonsense.  Newspapers, magazines, and broadcast networks rake in huge amounts of money from advertisers and sponsors.  The difference is that those outlets are compartmentalized whereas blogs tend not to be.  As I noted in the Bloggers in Amsterdam post, “I am not only the chief writer for the site but also the publisher, advertising manager, circulation manager, human resources director, and IT manager.”  Once upon a time, that was true for newspaper owners, too, before they became big businesses.

Existing FTC rules already ban deceptive and unfair business practices. The proposed guidelines aim to clarify the law and for the first time specifically include bloggers, defined loosely as anyone writing a personal journal online.

But here’s the difference: Most media companies have huge staffs and access to legal counsel.  Do we seriously expect people to hire lawyers before launching a mommy blog?  Apparently so.

If the guidelines are approved, bloggers would have to back up claims and disclose if they’re being compensated — the FTC doesn’t currently plan to specify how. The FTC could order violators to stop and pay restitution to customers, and it could ask the Justice Department to sue for civil penalties. Any type of blog could be scrutinized, not just ones that specialize in reviews.

So parents keeping blogs to update family members on their child’s first steps technically would fall under the FTC guidelines, though they likely would have little to worry about unless they accept payments or free products and write about them. But they would need to think twice if, for instance, they praise parenting books they’ve just read and include links to buy them at a retailer like Amazon.com Inc.

That’s because the guidelines also would cover the broader and common practice of affiliate marketing, in which bloggers and other sites get a commission when someone clicks on a link that leads to a purchase at a retailer. In such cases, merchants also would be responsible for actions by their sales agents — including a network of bloggers.

This is simply insane.  I tried Amazon affiliate links in the early days of OTB, found them ineffective, and removed them.  Others, like InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds, use them to what I presume (given that they’ve maintained them for years) is great success.  But there’s nothing insidious about the practice:  Books and other products are listed and people are free to buy them, with a tiny cut going to the site that posted the link.  You’re rather obviously at Amazon’s site and have to jump through quite a few hoops to order the item. Where’s the danger to consumers in that?

This sort of thing is more problematic:

Over the holidays, IZEA ran a campaign in which bloggers who don’t normally shop at Sears Holdings Corp.’s Kmart stores were given $500 gift cards and encouraged to write about their experiences in the stores. To reduce the chance of a bad review, the retailer said it avoided bloggers who previously made negative remarks about the company.

[...]

Mandatory disclosures could change how reviews are perceived online because many Internet users might never imagine that bloggers get compensation. “I don’t think, for the average reader of a blog, it immediately comes to mind that they actually have a relationship with the company,” said Sam Bayard, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “You think about (blogs) as personal, informal, off the cuff and coming from the heart — unfiltered, uncensored and unplanned.”

Now, this is something I would decline. In addition to not being sure how I’d spend $500 at KMart, it strikes me as a bit sleazy.  On the other hand, I’m not sure why the FTC would investigate something like this but allows the common practice of product placements in movie and television programs.  Most viewers are unaware that the hero’s wearing of an Omega watch was secured by payment of princely sums.

Surely, the federal government has better things to do than scouring blogs looking for undisclosed conflicts of interest?

UPDATE: Aaron Brazell, who tipped me to the story on Twitter, weighs in on his blog (as well as the comments on this post).  The gist of his argument is that nothing is changing but the medium:

Businesses are still subject to FTC regulations that protect the consumer from the overrun of over-capitalistic companies trying to beat the competition at the expense of the consumer. This new regulation will simply update existing regulations to more specifically clarify that, hey, yes, companies have to play by the same rules when it comes to bloggers too. Companies should be enforcing their legal requirements on anyone peddling their goods in a quid pro quo or financial exchange. This is fair trade.

I don’t disagree with that.  The problem with the proposed change — or perhaps the misreporting of it by Yao — is that it appears to target bloggers as publishers rather than merely extend existing limitations on advertising to blogs.   I’ve got no problem with the FTC going after advertisers for illegal practices. If a blogger engages in payola, though, the penalty should be exposure and loss of journalistic credibility, not fines from the FTC.

UPDATE II:  Ed Morrissey has more thoughts on this, focusing on the Amazon Affiliates program.  This, though, strikes me as the heart of the matter:

Bloggers do not occupy either a public-airwave space or a space with shortage of bandwidth.  They speak openly and freely, and have to maintain their credibility with their readers in order to maintain the kind of readership where these links start to accrue revenue back to the blogger.  If readers think the blogger is nothing more than a shill, then readers will disappear.  The free market takes care of itself in the blogosphere, especially in terms of credibility.

Quite right.

Story link from Aaron Brazell (@technosailor) via Twitter. Image via Tom Kirkendall.

Friend of OTB Aaron Brazell was on NPR very early today talking about the controversy over Congress and social media.

The cause of the Twittering representatives has been taken up by bloggers like Aaron Brazell of Technosailor. “Frankly, we’re in 2008, and we have a government for the people and by the people,” says Brazell, who lives in Baltimore. “Right now, all the evidence shows that people are getting their news increasingly on the Internet, and increasingly engaging with each other online, and that’s where Congress should be.”

Aaron was all over this story on his blog as well as Twitter and FriendFeed.

As if to prove Robert Heinlein correct, the House Administration Committee is, apparently with honorable intent, considering effectively banning the use of popular social media sites, including YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook by Members.

Soren Dayton couches this in partisan terms: “In typical fashion, House Democrats are trying to pass rules that stifle debate and require regulation.” In fact, though, it appears that existing rules are being interpreted by some to preclude Members from posting on these sites and the current effort is to address that.

The Franking Commission, created to govern how Congress used their right to mail letters to constituents for free, apparently “frowns on official links to campaign-related Web sites, political parties, advocacy groups and ‘any site the primary purpose of which is the conduct of commerce.’” That’s understandable, if highly problematic in the current communications environment.

Aaron Brazell posts a letter from Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Massachusetts 8th) to HAC Chairman Robert Brady suggesting a workaround, noting for example that the “existing tools available within the House to [post videos] are not user-friendly or efficient, and that in addition, server space withn the House is currently insufficient to meet the growing demand for video.”  He proposes a series of guidelines to solve this problem:

• Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;
• To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.
• Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.
• CHA, the Office of Web Assistance (OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

The partisan angle is being pushed especially hard by Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) who, as Mike Masnick puts it, has “been using Twitter to ignite a totally misguided partisan war, pretending (falsely) that Democrats are trying to prevent him from using Twitter.”  Indeed, Culberson’s name, which I must admit I can’t recall previously having heard, appears in virtually every blog post I’ve seen on the subject.

Masnick appears to be right that Capuano is trying to “make it easier to post content on various social media sites.”  But the rules are so hamhanded that they’ll make things harder.  Jesse Stay points out that, “this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.”

Mark Safranski also heard from Culberson and found him persuasive, largely because Nancy Pelosi and others are trying to reimpose the so-called Fairness Doctrine. He figures, “The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted.” Leaving aside the partisan angle, though and we’re still left with a really bad idea.

[O]n the technological merits alone this may be the goddamn dumbest thing I’ve heard of regarding the internet coming out of Congress in a long, long, time. The dinosaurs who are uncomfortable with computers, the unwashed masses being aware of their actions and free political debate want to turn the clock back to the 1970’s. Except during the 1970’s no one would have dared to propose controlling what  a democratically elected member of Congress could say to their constituents. Doesn’t it register in the Beltway that they are talking about public information that already belongs to the people of the United States? Senators and Congressmen should be interacting with citizens more freely, not less; the U.S. Congress needs radical transparency, not greater opacity imposed by the Democratic House leadership to better hide shady dealings.

It’s a brazenly Orwellian and most likely unconstitutional power grab by the Speaker of the House unlike anything dreamed of by any previous speaker – not Sam Rayburn, not Joseph Cannon. Nobody.

Ed Morrissey has a source (i.e., a flack sending out press releases to friendly bloggers) who says that Diane Feinstein is pushing a similar proposal in the Senate that would have “the Senate Rules Committee would become the Internet speech police for everyone in the Senate.”  Ed says this could have all manner of negative and far-reaching consequences.

David All passes along a message from House Minority Leader John Boehner which says, in part,

If the proposed rule is adopted, the free flow of information over the Internet between Americans and their representatives will be significantly curtailed. Americans who currently use free websites like YouTube to obtain uncensored daily information about congressional policy debates will instead be forced to go to websites “approved” by the House Administration Committee in order to continue getting such information. This would amount to new government censorship of the Internet, by a panel of federal officials that is neither neutral nor independent.

Interestingly, All contends, “not a single complaint had ever been filed against a Member of Congress for their web-use.”

One presumes that the net outcome of all this attention will be that Members are officially allowed to use social media outlets precisely as they’re already doing and that a handful more people will have heard of John Culberson.

Just when I think we’ve gotten the kinks worked out from converting to WordPress 2.5, Aaron Brazell tells me version 2.6 is about to come out! He’s written a handy dandy guide called 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 complete with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. (Actually, below, what with Web pages not having backs.)

I’m not a developer, so a lot of the changes don’t have any obvious benefit to me. The Google Gears Support, Post Versioning and improved Press This bookmarklet functionality look like they would be useful to me. Post Versioning would be especially nice since I have on more than one occasion accidentally overwritten a post because I had multiple instances open.

Theoretically, I should stop editing posts in WordPress’ built-in editor and get used to using an external editor. I’ve never found one, though, that wasn’t more trouble than it was worth, requiring me to go into the WordPress editor and clean up bad coding.

Aaron Brazell, who used to blog politics but now mostly does tech and social media, notes something interesting: While political blogs are blogging in terms of media coverage of the phenomenon, they’re actually a relatively small part of the story. It’s not just that, as we all know, personal diary blogs far outnumber others in sheer volume but that political blogs make up a relatively small segment of the blogs people actually read and link to.

[O]nly one blog, Huffington Post remains in the top 10 blogs in existence, a range that is dominated by tech blogs. Of the Technorati Top 100, only 16 could be deemed “political” blogs.

Intuitively, it’s not all that surprising that tech blogs would compete well with their political counterparts. After all, techies dominated the Internet for most of its existence. And discussions of gadgetry and whatnot don’t bifurcate along party lines (unless you count the Apple/PC feud). Further, there’s more “new” out there in the tech world whereas the topics discussed on political blogs are widely covered, dispersing the audience. But here’s the thing: It wasn’t always thus. Political blogs were much more represented in the Top 100 four years ago than now.

It’s not just linkage, either. The top tech blogs have more traffic than their political counterparts.

And this doesn’t even take into account celebrity gossip blogs, which dominate the traffic charts as tabulated by BlogAds.

Have reading and usage patterns changed that much? Or are the metrics simply capturing reality with more precision? Alternatively, do the tech blogs simply interlink more than is the norm on political blogs? Or have the techies figured out a way to “game” the system as political bloggers did years ago to the old TTLB Ecosystem, simply rendering it meaningless as a true measure?

Another thing: There are “Top 10″ blogs on Technorati that I’ve never heard of. I don’t think my reading habits are particularly specialized or insular. How can sites with over 10,000 links to them have escaped my attention?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds responds, “I’m not surprised to hear this — based on email, etc., people are a lot more interested in my tech- and lifestyle-related posts than the political ones. And if you look in the larger world, the most popular TV shows, magazines, etc., are not the ones about politics.”

Indeed.

Aaron Brazell is doing some research on the evolution of blogging in recent years and has asked for my input. [Update: The result, "Political Blogging 2.0," is now up.]

I started OTB in January 2003 and have seen a lot of change. I should note at the outset that my experience is almost entirely with the political blogosphere, a tiny fraction of the whole enterprise, and that my observations mostly apply in that realm.

Blogging for Dollars: When I started, even the likes of Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit and the then-independent Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish were hobby blogs. People put up PayPal “tip jars” and, in Sully’s case, held periodic “fund drives” but there was no way to make a living at the enterprise unless you were Mickey Kaus.

Henry Copeland introduced BlogAds in 2002 but it would be some time before it came to fruition. Others would follow. Additionally, dozens of bloggers have “taken the Boeing” and been hired by magazines, think tanks, and other organizations as bloggers or, in some cases, had their blogs absorbed outright.

There’s even a cottage industry, exemplified by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger and Brian Clark’s Copyblogger, of How to Make Money Blogging blogs.

It should be noted that only a relative handful of the millions of blogs out there are making serious income. Then again, those are (mostly) the blogs that have a wide audience. Many have speculated that monetization of blogs would turn us into nothing but small-staff versions of mainstream press, introducing fears about alienating potential advertisers and bringing pressure to write about things that will generate pageviews. Some of that has happened, I think, although indirectly. Certainly, many bloggers (following advice from Rowse, Clark, and others) are altering content to maximize search engine traffic for purposes of driving ad revenue. Then again, people were doing a lot of that even in the hobby blogging days because high SiteMeter numbers were a status symbol and there’s a competitive aspect to the blogging “game.”

Blogging Communties Daily Kos was already one of the more popular blogs when I started. Then, though, it was just Markos doing his takes on the issues plus an interwoven group blog called Political State Report. Soon, though, he introduced his Diaries, allowing readers to set up blogs-within-the-blog. His site traffic exploded and others have followed. This was the basis of what would be dubbed “The Netroots.” Diarists that distinguished themselves moved to the front pages and graduated to their own blogs.

Blogging Activism In early 2003, most of the top tier blogs were right-of-center opinion and observation blogs. Within a year, that had changed radically. Through a combination of the Left forming communities much earlier and with much more success than the Right and the fact that Republicans controlled the White House and Congress and thus energized an angry opposition, sites supporting Democrats — and, mostly, more staunchly “progressive” candidates — began to dominate the political blogosphere.

Blogs, especially on the Left, started raising money — serious money — for political candidates and seeing themselves as major players in the process. An increasing number of the most popular blogs saw themselves as leaders in a Movement rather than as mere commentators on public affairs.

Polarization of the Blogosphere While there are more thoughtful, moderate tone blogs now than ever, the trend has been toward harsh polemics. Many of the top political bloggers have come on to the scene since I started and almost all who have risen to the top have been more Ann Coulter or Michael Moore than George Will or David Broder.

Syndication and Aggregation While Real Simple Syndication (RSS) technology existed when I started OTB, almost no one was actually reading sites that way. Most people were still reading sites via bookmarks or following blogroll links from one site to another. Now, most regular readers are keeping up with blogs through some sort of feed reader and clicking in to the site itself only to participate in the comments section discussion or (in the case of partial feeds) to finish reading entries that interest them.

A related development, which applies mostly to bloggers rather than average readers, is the rise of sites like Memeorandum, which aggregate the stories and blog posts generating the most buzz. This has pushed bloggers away from their old reading lists and into a more homogeneous “Story of the Day” mode. While convenient, it has made the medium more similar than it once was to the mainstream press.

Blogging Goes Mainstream After several years of being a curiosity, people have finally stopped asking “What is a blog, anyway?” Media stories about blogs and bloggers have finally stopped defining the term (usually badly). Further, aside from a hardcore audience of regular visitors to a site, most people read blogs in the same way they read other Web content, accessing individual pages via search referrals or hyperlinks on other pages, and don’t necessarily even understand that they’re at a blog.

Blogger Outreach Bloggers, especially those with a relatively high profile, have increasingly become targets for PR firms, political operatives, and even major media outlets eager to cash in on the buzz. Just about every presidential, congressional, or gubernatorial candidate now has an effort to court bloggers for favorable coverage. We’re also the target of lobbying in a way that the mainstream press isn’t, since we’re in the opinion business.

One outgrowth of this is the hiring of established bloggers, especially activist bloggers, as campaign staff and blogger outreach directors for PR firms. While providing another avenue for bloggers to make a living with their writing skills, it’s a development that has some potential ethical complications. Bloggers who work briefly for a campaign, especially for a controversial candidate, tend to be forever tarred with that association and readers naturally wonder whether they’re getting unvarnished views.

Blog Parasites: Spammers and Scrapers A more insidious way that non-bloggers are trying to cash in on the rise of blogs is using technological means to make money.

The most longstanding is spamming of comment sections and trackback links to game the search engines, getting unearned links to their sites and thus increasing their rankings. This has gotten more sophisticated over time and created a spy-vs-spy game in which the spammers invent new technologies to counter ever-better spam filters. OTB gets thousands a day, almost all of which are caught by our filters. The price we pay, though, is wasted time policing these activities and ever-more-cumbersome measures that make commenting more difficult for site readers.

A more recent phenomenon is the rise of “splogs,” auto-generated blogs that are created by stealing material off of RSS feeds for popular blogs. The splogs make money from unearned page impressions generated by search engines, drawing traffic and money away from sites that actually created the content. Even worse, the splogs often wind up ranked higher in the search engines than the original sites, since the splogs tend to micro-focus on a handful of keywords, and the original sites actually get penalized in the rankings because of “duplicate content.”

UPDATE: Bill Quick, who coined the term “blogosphere,” alludes to another big change in the comments below:

The Rise of the Group Blog: In early 2003, the number of multi-author blogs was tiny. Winds of Change was perhaps the only one wide a wide audience at the time. Now, a large percentage of the top blogs have multiple posters even if, like Daily Pundit and OTB, the blog founder still does most of the posting. Not done well, this can dilute the quality of the blog, especially if the other members are not good writers or there’s no coherent voice. Done well, though, it can provide synergy, bringing together many talented writers who might otherwise not produce enough content to keep a blog viable. Crooked Timber is perhaps the best example.

My first post* at Outside the Beltway was at 9:47 the morning of January 31, 2003. If my math is right, that was five years ago.

When I started this thing, the blogosphere was in its infancy, with most of the big political sites no more than a year or two old. There were still regular Big Media pieces explaining, often incorrectly, exactly what a “blog” was. Now, the most popular blogs are getting traffic numbers rivaling newspaper circulation rates and one can envision in the not-too-distant future a day when we’ll have to explain to the kids what a “newspaper” was.

In the last five years, I’ve written 16,675 posts here — some of them even good. My various co- and guest bloggers have added another 3000 or so: Rodney Dill (848), Steve Verdon (810), Kate McMillan (281), Alex Knapp (145), Greg Tinti (136), Dave Schuler (128), Steven Taylor (110), Richard Gardner (103), Chris Lawrence (69), Robert Prather (38), Dodd Harris (27), John Burgess (25), Steve Bainbridge (6), Aaron Brazell (5), and Bill Jempty (1). (Robert Tagorda and Leopold Stotch were also early contributors but their user accounts are no longer in the database, even though their posts are still part of the archives. According to my Fourth Blogiversary post, they had 240 and 152 posts, respectively.)

We’re a couple weeks shy of hitting the 25 million unique visitor mark on SiteMeter, which is the only measure I have that goes back more-or-less to the beginning of the site (February 4th); others have been lost and different metrics used as we’ve switched site hosts.

Thanks, as always, to all who visit, comment, and link.

_________

Related:

• Fourth Blogiversary
• Three Year Blogiversary
• OTB: 2005 Year in Review
• OTB: 2004 Year in Review
• Two Year Blogiversary
• One Year Blogiversary

*That post, and the first three months’ worth, were at Blogspot at a URL that has since been hijacked. Thankfully, all the posts were migrated to this domain.

A few days ago, Aaron Brazell announced that his popular Web 2.0 blog, Technosailor, would start featuring regular Spanish-language posts in the niche by Carlos Granier-Phelps. I found the idea odd at first and then remarkably annoying once implemented.

It’s not especially hard, frankly, to skip past the odd Spanish language post in Google Reader, yet I find their presence surprisingly grating. Aaron has added an Espanol tab atop his site which allows readers to read just the Spanish language content but has thus far not created an English-only variant for either the site itself or its feed.

Granier is undoubtedly providing some fine insights into the Technosailor niche yet they’re completely useless to me and, I presume, the vast majority of the site’s readers. Presumably, some will be annoyed and stop reading. Almost certainly, he’ll also bring in new readers.

I wonder, though, about the implications of this. Years ago, the rise of group blogs looked to be destroying the very thing that made blogging unique: The voice and perspective of a single author. Many good blogs were rendered not worth reading by the addition of multiple authors and the resulting dilution of the brand. Others, though, managed to bring together the right combination of voices and create interesting synergies. Now, group blogs — and blog networks — have become all the rage.

As the Internet becomes more mainstream around the globe, there will surely be a demand for content in more languages and an incentive to try to capitalize on that. Will multi-language sites become the norm? Or will sites clone themselves into linguistic variants?

One would think the latter model more likely to succeed. It makes sense to bring together complementary expertise, in whatever language, to leverage it. My guess, though, is that it will be more efficient to segregate it into multiple, networked sites — or at least distinct pages within the same site — rather than create a blog of Babel.

Steven Taylor has taken a mixed approach with La Política Colombiana, an offshoot of PoliBlog. He’s taken his Columbian politics niche content and placed it on a separate site, figuring most of that information would be uninteresting to his regular readers, and has both English- and Spanish-language content. In that particular case, though, the audience is presumed to be bilingual.

There’s so much good content out there that most of us are constantly adding RSS feeds to our readers and looking for reasons to pare down the list (indeed, Aaron has written about that process several times). Sites where significant numbers of the posts are quite literally unintelligible will probably be prime targets.

Aaron Brazell has a great run-down of all the new features available in the latest WordPress release, version 2.2. I like the fact that WordPress is moving to a release early, release often model.

There does not appear to be much in this update that I’ll use, although the new editing functionality might be helpful. I still haven’t drunk the widget Kool-Aid, since I never found it particularly hard to paste code directly into my sidebar includes, but they’re now built into the code rather than produced by a plug-in. The fact that the preview window now opens into a new window will also be nice, as it was ridiculously slow the old way.

In a column for The Politico, David All argues that the Republicans’ comparatively poor showing in online fundraising and presence on social networking sites like mySpace and Facebook indicates a need to catch up fast.

To head off electoral catastrophe, Republicans should take immediate steps to improve their technological game. They can begin by creating a nationwide network of state and local blogs. Democrats, after all, proudly tout their legions of “blogging boots on the ground,” which feed political intelligence back to a central outlet. From that central feed, thousands of blogs throughout the nation echo the narrative, driving news stories and changing the political landscape. Republicans can and should do the same to better tap into niche markets of supporters who are willing to fight the battle — wherever it is.

To better leverage the power of collaborative fundraising, Republicans should also follow the example of the left wings ActBlue.com. There, Democratic candidates from City Hall to the White House can create an account to direct funds to their cause. ActBlue allows its users to find supporters wherever they assemble — not just at the partys website.

While I’m still skeptical of most of the social networking sites and think mySpace is mostly for kids, Facebook and some of the others are quickly catching on among political professionals. Whether this will have a major impact on 2008, I don’t know.

Still, as Aaron Brazell argued earlier, “Social Media is the wave of the future.” Even if, as I suspect, the 18- to 24-year-olds networking on Facebook don’t turn into a major voting block next year, they’ll be 22- to 27-year-olds in 2012 and 26- to 31-year-olds in 2016. And they live online. It certainly makes sense to figure out how to reach them now.

That’s especially true when one considers the latest Pew research on youth voting trends.

Young people are increasingly identifying with the Democrats. Now, this is mostly due to genuine policy differences on military and social issues and partly due to the popularity of Bill Clinton and the unpopularity of George W. Bush than effectiveness of outreach. Still, it’s undeniable that the Democrats have done a much better job of reaching out to young activists online.

UPDATE: I swear there was a reputable survey this week that showed youth identification trending Democrat. The above study, sadly, isn’t it.

Of interest primarily to bloggers, Aaron Brazell continues his WordPress FAQ series by answering one of my questions: “What advantages obtain from direct tagging, whether manually or by widget, vice using the WP category?”

Major League Baseball is breaking out the pink bats for Mother’s Day.

Hulking Jim Thome. Rugged Manny Ramirez. Brawny Adam Dunn. “The thought of these big macho men, swinging pink bats to help women with breast cancer … what a novel idea,” Louisville Slugger president John Hillerich said Tuesday. Major League Baseball granted special permission for players to use the colorful bats – baby pink, at that – for Mother’s Day. They’re part of a weeklong program to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Derek Jeter, David Eckstein and Marcus Giles are among dozens of players who intend to try them Sunday. This is the first time pink has been approved for bats – dyed at the Louisville Slugger factory, they’re usually black, brown, reddish or white.

Kevin Mench was among several Texas players who wanted their mother’s names burned on the bats. The Rangers slugger, who homered in seven straight games earlier this season, also planned to have a bat for his grandmother, who died from breast cancer. “My mom is the glue of our family, and I just want to do something to thank her for all that she has done,” Mench said before Tuesday night’s game against Minnesota. “At the same time, we are raising money for a great cause.”

[...]

Along with the pink bats, players and all on-field personnel will wear pink wristbands and a pink ribbon for breast cancer awareness on their uniforms. The pink ribbon logo will appear on the bases and on commemorative home plates, and the lineups will be written on pink cards. The bats, along with the home plates and lineup cards, will be autographed by the teams and will be auctioned off later with the proceeds going to the Breast Cancer Foundation.

A nice gesture, to be sure.

Still, I always have the same questions about these things: Does MLB favor breast cancer every other day? And what about the diseases/causes whose logos they aren’t wearing?

Further, presuming symbolism actually matters, why breast cancer? It’s sufficiently ubiquitous that you’d have to be a dolt not to be aware of it. No one that I’m aware of opposes finding a cure for it. Why not use the media spotlight of MLB to highlight a less celebrated cause?

Update: Aaron Brazell is troubled by the idea of “Barry Bonds breaking the Babe’s homerun record using a pink bat.”

Update: Jeff Vreeland asks, “Are we going to have Blue Bases for Prostate Cancer on Father’s Day?” They’d better, unless they want to send the message that they hate men and want them to die.

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