Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
TechnoSailor‘s Aaron Brazell has published the long-awaited “10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 3.0″ post. The author of the recently-released The WordPress Bible — and, full disclosure, someone who has done extensive development work for me — is a true WordPress insider and his “10 Things You Need to Know” posts on each [...]
It has long been an article of faith that — in terms of authorship, comment policy, other user interaction, and linking policies — Left-leaning bloggers are more communitarian and Right-leaning bloggers more individualistic. At the same time, however, several studies have found that neither side does a very good job of linking to and discussing [...]
Like many of us, Jim Henley reads blogs through a feed reader. Now, he’s working on customizing his reading experience by creating some “edited feeds” via Yahoo Pipes that eliminates recurring posts that he doesn’t like: Open-Thread-Free Eschaton, Outside the Beltway — Substantive (no caption contests or music videos), and Poliblogger Gringofied (no Latin American [...]
A well-known gossip rag circulated rumors that Chief Justice John Roberts would soon resign for “personal reasons.” While the story was soon retracted, it had already spread like wildfire thanks to Twitter, blogs, and other fast-moving media. Kevin Drum was rightly dubious of the rumor but, more to to point, “curious about is where something [...]
Kay Bailey Hutchison’s bizarre campaign to beat incumbent Texas Governor Rick Perry in the Republican primary has ended in embarrassing defeat. Gov. Rick Perry won a decisive victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Texas GOP primary for governor Tuesday night, bringing a bruising fight between two of the state’s most popular Republicans to [...]
Mickey Kaus, who was blogging before there was a blogosphere, has taken steps to run against California Democrat Barbra Boxer for the U.S. Senate. Pioneering political blogger Mickey Kaus took out papers filed to run for U.S. Senate in California, he told LA Weekly. The Venice resident said he’ll run this year against Barbara Boxer [...]
Since hiring Andrew Sullivan and a slew of other already-established bloggers a couple years back, the Atlantic Monthly website has gone through quite a few design changes. But last week’s total reorganization of the site into a series of channels, subsuming all the blogs except Andrew’s into what amounts to collections of links to archives, [...]
If you’re trying to sell political magazines, you’re better off when your team is out of power and angry. Vanity Fair‘s Matt Pressman investigates this blinding flash of the obvious: The George W. Bush years were good for more than just oilfield-services companies and waterboard manufacturers. They were also a boon for liberal political magazines, [...]
Glenn Reynolds, Stacy McCain, Jim Hoft, Lonely Conservative and others continue to point to rather thin evidence that UAH mass murderer Amy Bishop was a “socialist.” She went to Harvard after all. And one kid on a prof rating website called her one. QED! As I’ve previously noted, her politics seem rather irrelevant. Certainly, [...]
Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins saw this billboard as he “whizzed past it on I-35 in Wyoming last week on the way back from Wrenshall.” He’s rather bemused at the reception his blog post on this has gotten: FoxNews asked me to be on today to talk about the billboard. I declined, noting I don’t [...]
Congrats to Sean Hackbarth who is today celebrating the 10th anniversary of The American Mind, where he was blogging before there was such a thing. An excerpt from his longer, reflective post: Weblogs are a wonderfully messy communication medium that has given many a way to express themselves, rant, rave, and inform. Weblogs have helped [...]
Norm Geras remains baffled at the Twitter phenomenon. Responding to a column by Nicholas Lezard, Norm asks: (1) Why would I want to record my daily activities for other people to follow? (2) Why would I want to follow the detailed doings of anyone else over the course of a day, and another day, and [...]
Related controversies roiling the blogosphere today point to the dark side of American politics. First, NewsMax ran an article by a John L. Perry titled “Obama Risks a Domestic Military ‘Intervention.’” It has apparently been removed from the site (it’s now directing to the home page and isn’t showing along with the author’s other pieces) [...]
A series of scandals uncovered by conservative outlets and ignored by the mainstream press are starting to raise some uncomfortable questions. The right-wing media’s single-minded focus on a handful of targets over the past months and its success in pushing those stories into the mainstream have underscored the sharp divide between traditional news organizations and [...]
A discussion that has been going on for a while among the tech bloggers and Twitterati is the idea that RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is dead. A study published last October found that 78% of U.S. online adults did not use it and only 19% of those who didn’t had any interest in using it [...]
Jayvie Canono has a useful discussion about the magazine-style format that has taken the blog world by storm over the last couple of years. Among the non-technical issues he raises is this: Will your readers like it? Maybe they would prefer that they just keep scrolling down to keep reading your posts. Maybe you should [...]
A Vogue cover model of whom I’d never previously heard and does not conform to my preconceptions of what a Vogue cover model looks like has won a lawsuit against Google over an anonymous former blogger who called her names on the Internet. A Vogue cover girl has won a precedent-setting court battle to unmask [...]
Having apparently learned nothing from its TimesSelect debacle wherein, by charging a nominal fee to read its opinion columnists, the NYT ensured no one read said columns much less linked to them, the paper is floating a trial balloon of charging $5 a month to read its online edition. Michael Crowley is enthusiastic: Given that [...]
Copyblogger‘s Brian Clark has noticed a distinction developing between blogs on the one hand and “social media” on the other. He rightly notes that “blogs were the first modern form of social media” and thus the distinction is artificial. My sense is that, blogs are indeed social media, they’re definitely of a different piece than [...]
Over at his other digs, Dave Schuler muses, Is it my imagination or do things become very, very quiet on Fridays these days? I know that traffic at this blog drops sharply on Fridays which suggests to me that a lot of people read blogs from work and that they aren’t at work on Fridays. [...]
Bernard Finel has been trying this blogging thing for a while and finds that it’s harder than it looks. He notes that even very short posts require quite a bit of effort. Even short posts take me forever. Not writing the text, per se, but I think most posts are useful if you include a [...]
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 [...]
Quite a kerfuffle has broken out in the blogs and on Twitter over President Obama’s calling on HuffPo’s Nico Pitney to ask a pre-screened question in yesterday’s press conference. Politico’s Michael Calderone broke the story: In what appeared to be a coordinated exchange, President Obama called on the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney near the start [...]
The erstwhile Dr. Leopold Stotch passes along news of the exploits of a fellow Irish prankster: When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news. His report card: [...]
Craig Henry surveys two pieces from the recent “How to save the dying newspaper industry” meme that’s been going around and sounds a much more optimistic note than generally seen in the blogosphere. He points to a February TIME piece by Walter Isaacson (“How to Save Your Newspaper”) that advocates a micropayment system. While pretty [...]
Rand Fishking and Darren Rowse have noted a remarkable decline in the social nature of blogs, most notably the culture of inter-linking, and think Twitter and other social media outlets may be partly to blame. In 2006, a popular blog post or piece of content would generate a remarkable amount of blogging activity. It wasn’t [...]
Jules Crittenden is shocked that lefty firebrands Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald have continued ranting and raving about injustice now that their guy is in charge over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One possible explanation for this is that, rather than having simply been partisan hacks fomenting faux outrage at the Bush Administration, they’re intellectually honest [...]
Justin Fox gets it just right on the current flap between Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and CNBC’s Jim Cramer: Even with the best of intentions, you can’t be on the air live for 17 hours a day and only broadcast intelligent things. And CNBC’s intention is not to do good, but to get as many [...]
Steve Rubel points to what I hope is a trend. Interesting discussion overnight between my friends Robert Scoble and MIke Arrington over whether Robert’s personal brand diminished because of his love for Friendfeed. How refreshing and retro that this conversation is actually taking place via blogs instead of just on Twitter and Friendfeed, where I [...]
A weird incident over the weekend demonstrates the potential problems of institutional blogging. Matt Yglesias wrote a rather innocuous, inside-baseball post arguing that, although it’s “a neat organization,” Third Way is “incrementalist” (not to mention excrementalist) and is really “messaging and political tactics outfit” rather than a think tank. Out of nowhere, the blog was [...]
Kevin Drum seconds my concerns about conservative public intellectuals and offers two example where the Right isn’t offering useful policy alternatives. Conservatives on Global Warming Take global warming. Here’s the rough conservative reaction to it starting in the early 90s: It doesn’t exist. It exists but it isn’t manmade. It’s manmade, but it’s too expensive [...]
In Saturday’s post “Talk Radio Killed Conservativism?” I observed parenthetically that “most of the best analytical blogs are on the center-left” and promised to elaborate. It’s something that has struck me for quite some time (see, for example, February’s “Rational Conservative Blogs“) and that was brought to mind again with two links at Matt Yglesias’ [...]
Andrew Sullivan, who was editor-in-chief of The New Republic when he was 12 and now works at The Atlantic, notes that the websites of conservative opinion magazines National Review and The Weekly Standard get no more traffic than the top conservative blogs. So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of [...]
Patrick Ruffini takes up where Jon Henke and John Hawkins leave off, offering a lament that conservative bloggers don’t engage in activism to the extent that their lefty counterparts do, thus leading to the demise of Western Civilization as we know it. Righty Pundits vs. Lefty Activists Ruffini thinks the rightosphere is mired in 2003 [...]
Team McCain has launched an exciting new program that, as WaPo’s Paul Fahri puts it, “combines the features of ‘AstroTurf’ campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.” Here’s how McCain’s site puts it: Help spread the word about John McCain on news and blog [...]
NYT Katharine Seelye reports on a panel on bloggers and swearing at Netroots Nation (the successor to YearlyKos) and finds that the trend is toward less of it and that most of what remains is coming from Amanda Marcotte. Digby Parton, who writes on Hullabaloo.com, said she initially thought of her blog as an ephemeral [...]
Alan Jacobs: “Nothing could better justify Ross’s decision to start moderating comments on his blog than the comments on the announcement itself.” For those who don’t click links, Ross Douthat has announced that, “From now on, one of the Atlantic‘s crack interns will be going through the comment threads at the end of every business [...]
Not our standard fare but a hard one to resist: A man from Oakland County [Michigan] has been arrested and charged in an Internet sex sting. Daniel Everett, 33, of Clarkston was talking online with a 14-year-old girl who he met in a chat room. The two had graphic sexual conversations and Everett propositioned the [...]
Stilgherrian has attended one too many Future of Media conferences and he has a long tirade for Old Media journalists whining about bloggers and professional standards. What’s tiring about this false dichotomy is that it compares the highest ideal of journalism with the lowest grade of personal blogging about what the cat did yesterday and [...]
Barack Obama has taken things off his campaign site that might be used by opponents to embarrass him, James Gordon Meek reports in the NY Daily News under the headline “Obama Purges Web Critique of Surge.” Why, it’s our Outrage of the Day! Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to [...]
In commenting about John McCain’s budget plans, Matthew Yglesias threw out this comment: Given the present circumstances, I can’t think of any good reason for a presidential candidate to be promising to that we’ll be at balanced budgets in four years. It would be nice to see the deficit on a decreasing trajectory rather than [...]
John Sides and Eric Lawrence begin an LAT piece on the importance of political blogs, “Who listens to blogging heads?” thusly: Daily Kos. Little Green Footballs. Talking Points Memo. Instapundit. Firedoglake. Captain’s Quarters. These are among the thousands of political blogs that are increasingly a factor in U.S. politics. Given that Ed Morrissey shuttered the [...]
Newsweek has released a new poll and is excited by the huge change: “Glow Fading? The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows Barack Obama leading John McCain by only 3 points. What a difference a few weeks can make.” This is quite amusing in that pretty much everyone agreed that the June 20th Newsweek poll was an [...]
Publius thinks it’s time to ban the phrase “Sister Souljah” moment, not just because it’s hackneyed but because it has been misused. The more benign interpretation is that a Sister Souljah moment occurs when a candidate criticizes some group or idea nominally aligned with that candidate. In short, it’s criticizing your own coalition — or [...]
Daniel Strauss sat through a session at the center-left New America Foundation yesterday and came away with an epiphany about John McCain’s campaign: “It’s what he’s saying, not how he says it.” Jeremy Rosner observed, A lot of people have noted he’s just very incoherently between the right and the center, between offshore drilling and [...]
Duncan Riley laments the demise of the blogroll. Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at [...]
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 [...]
Google Maps is beta testing a new “walking directions” feature, Alex Chitu reports. Apparently, it’s just being tested out on a small number of randomly selected users. Since I wasn’t among those selected, I was a bit dubious since I was unable to personally verify, let alone test, said service. A quick search of another [...]
John McCain’s latest ad, “Love,” contrasts himself with those dirty hippies who spent the summer of 1968 on sex, drugs, and rock and roll rather than being tortured for their country. The voiceover: It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The “Summer Of Love.” Half a world away, another kind of love — [...]