This is the kind of thing there needs to be lots more of to establish a culture where people realize that they can do real reporting and distribute it on the Net.
Arianna Huffington, whose name will help distribute news of the contest, shall be the judge. I wonder what it is beyond her name though. While she is a leading pundit and the face of a massively popular news links/superblog site, I haven't seen much in the way of citizen journalism from her quarters.
I can think of three other online journalism figures who are better equiped to judge: Dan Gillmor, who wrote the book on Citizen Journalism -- "We the Media" -- or two of the real-time living pioneers of citizen journalism: John Byrne of Raw Story, or Josh Marshall of his TPM mini empire.
]]>This is the kind of thing there needs to be lots more of to establish a culture where people realize that they can do real reporting and distribute it on the Net.
Arianna Huffington, whose name will help distribute news of the contest, shall be the judge. I wonder what it is beyond her name though. While she is a leading pundit and the face of a massively popular news links/superblog site, I haven't seen much in the way of citizen journalism from her quarters.
I can think of three other online journalism figures who are better equiped to judge: Dan Gillmor, who wrote the book on Citizen Journalism -- "We the Media" -- or two of the real-time living pioneers of citizen journalism: John Byrne of Raw Story, or Josh Marshall of his TPM mini empire.
Gather is a site that plans to give its content providers revenue from advertsing on its pages -- an economic model, which I have to say, is a rather promising one. More detail: "It just seems fair that we share our advertising revenue with you based on the quality and popularity of the content you contribute on Gather. We will also share some of our revenue with you if you choose to use the site actively, exploring content that others write, searching on Gather and on the web, and inviting your friends, family, and colleagues to use the site. We will pay occasional users in points that you will be able to use to purchase goods and services from Gather partners in a few months. We will pay frequent users, who write great content consistently, in cash if they choose."
]]>What has Cegelis supporters hopping mad is that George Stephanopolous -- the new top ABC political correspondent and former Emanuel colleague in the Clinton White House -- has invited Duckworth on his show "This Week," and not Cegelis for equal time. Charges of favoritism and favorism and good-ole'-boyism are flying, and Cegelis' supporters want justice, damnit!
]]>From the National Journal Hotline:
When we saw this blog post asserting that VA Gov. Mark Warner was finished campaigning for candidate Tim Kaine, we did not make too much of it. After all Warner just on the campaign trail with Kainein NoVA on Monday and the two are slated to join forces again tomorrow in SW VA. But when some GOP officials started circulating the post to the media, we thought we'd check it out.
]]>"Nothing could be further from the truth," says Warner political adviser Mame Reiley. She said that Warner is with Kaine "lock, stock and barrel" and that Warner had actually recently asked his staff to "carve out some more time" on his schedule so that he can spend more time with his preferred successor.
From the National Journal Hotline:
When we saw this blog post asserting that VA Gov. Mark Warner was finished campaigning for candidate Tim Kaine, we did not make too much of it. After all Warner just on the campaign trail with Kainein NoVA on Monday and the two are slated to join forces again tomorrow in SW VA. But when some GOP officials started circulating the post to the media, we thought we'd check it out.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," says Warner political adviser Mame Reiley. She said that Warner is with Kaine "lock, stock and barrel" and that Warner had actually recently asked his staff to "carve out some more time" on his schedule so that he can spend more time with his preferred successor.
So why this rumor? Because GOPers are "petrified at [Warner's] impact on the race," says Reiley.
Kos, who picked up on this, writes:
"This is the tactic the GOP developed in the South Dakota senate race last year -- leak damaging information, irrespective of the truth, onto blogs. Then, GOP party and campaign officials circulated those blog posts to the media, demanding that they follow up on the allegations. Media, afraid of being called "liberal," wrote about the allegations.
"It's now clearly SOP, and Democratic campaigns need to become well versed in the blogosphere, see these attacks coming in advance, and be prepared to rebut them when necessary (as in, when reporters call asking for comment).
"And note, it's not that blogs are reporting rumors or making allegations -- it's that Republican operatives then push those blog posts on to the media. Even when they are patently and obviously false as claiming Warner is ditching the Kaine campaign even though his schedule is full of joint events."
]]>Nour fought the crackdown. When his website was blocked, he copied his daily bulletin and e-mailed it to every reader registered on his site. He sat down at his computer to do the same thing the next day, only to discover that his e-mail address had been blocked.
Undaunted, Abdel Nour gave himself a fresh address, and the bulletin went whizzing off. Come the next day, that address, too, had been disabled. So he created another.
]]>The cyber-jousting went on, day after day, for a month and a half. At last, the security services gave up. "Finally," Abdel Nour said, "they surrendered because they realized they can't control it."
Nour fought the crackdown. When his website was blocked, he copied his daily bulletin and e-mailed it to every reader registered on his site. He sat down at his computer to do the same thing the next day, only to discover that his e-mail address had been blocked.
Undaunted, Abdel Nour gave himself a fresh address, and the bulletin went whizzing off. Come the next day, that address, too, had been disabled. So he created another.
The cyber-jousting went on, day after day, for a month and a half. At last, the security services gave up. "Finally," Abdel Nour said, "they surrendered because they realized they can't control it."
]]>Keystroke by keystroke, Syria's online voices are awakening from the slumber imposed by the late President Hafez Assad, who severely restricted both the Internet and satellite dishes. Things began to loosen when his son Bashar took over in 2000. He joined the Syrian Computer Society, encouraged citizens to explore the Internet and trumpeted technology as a hallmark of the new era he promised to usher in.
Finally, after a week and 17,740 entries from MoveOn members we have a winner in the Fire Karl Rove Slogan Contest. And the winner is...
]]>"Loose Lips Deserve Pink Slips. Fire Karl Rove."
Now that we have the slogan we need to get it out there. We've designed a downloadable poster from the winning slogan. You can print it easily on a desktop printer and it's perfect to place in your window, hang on your refrigerator, and tack on a bulletin board at home, work or in your community, in a gym locker or anywhere else that makes sense. Take a minute right now to click on the link below to download and print the poster (you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Finally, after a week and 17,740 entries from MoveOn members we have a winner in the Fire Karl Rove Slogan Contest. And the winner is...
"Loose Lips Deserve Pink Slips. Fire Karl Rove."
Now that we have the slogan we need to get it out there. We've designed a downloadable poster from the winning slogan. You can print it easily on a desktop printer and it's perfect to place in your window, hang on your refrigerator, and tack on a bulletin board at home, work or in your community, in a gym locker or anywhere else that makes sense. Take a minute right now to click on the link below to download and print the poster (you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader).
The winner of the contest, Mary Thornquist, received 16,826 votes. That's a heck of a lot more people thinking about the best message than the usual "Tom, Eli, Justin, Carrie and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team."
]]>I predict that this site will become the defacto HQ for all Democratic politics in Ohio because it offers a platform for citizen participation without waiting for local county officials to rubber stamp what they do. Tim Tagaris, a Grow Ohio site administrator, who previously worked on Chuck Pennacchio's 2006 Pennsylvania Senate campaign, describes the absence of local Democratic online resources in Ohio:
At the county level in Ohio, the problem is much more acute. Forty of our eighty-eight counties do not even have a website, the most basic and cheapest way to organize and mass communicate with communities in Ohio. As an early recognizer of Grow Ohio, today's readers are no doubt aware of the baseline ways a website and online interactivity can help organize, fundraise, communicate, inform, drive press coverage, and countless other applications useful to candidates and organizations. In fact, if you look closely at the blogs listed in the regional blogrolls, you will find many Ohioans (and early Grow Ohio readers) are picking up the slack at the local level.
Now that this distributed political platform is established -- that is to say, the code has been written, and residual knowledge about how to operate something like this has started to accumulate, there's no reason this can't be copied and pasted 50 times for a national party online infrastructure. Politicians and state parties take note, use this model or ignore it at your peril. What's amazing is that all of this I expect will ultimately roll into Sherrod Brown's 2006 campaign.
]]>]]>The story began sometime in May: a certain user vchk, blogging on the Russian sector of the Livejournal site, uploaded an old Soviet propaganda poster that had a Slavic child against the backdrop of a dead woman and a burning village. The inscription was supposed to read "Daddy, kill a German!" But vchk -- or whoever messed with the original -- wrote it the cute way: Kill a NATO soldier.
Then, about a month and a half ago, after an anonymous denunciation to Livejournal's now infamous Abuse Team led to the guy's blog getting closed down, several politically-minded bloggers, including a mathematician named Mikhail Verbitsky (the now-defunct user Tiphareth), organized a virtual flashmob in support of Livejournal's first Russian political victim. Dozens of people started posting "Ubei NATOvtsa" or "Ubei NATO" in solidarity. The provocation -- as some called it -- led to a massacre indeed: according to unofficial estimates, some 20-30 blogs -- including Tiphareth's -- were deleted for indecency, violence, or violations of the Abuse Team's Terms of Service. Some were restored after users deleted the offensive posts, while some, like Tiphareth, proudly refused and took their blogging business elsewhere.
The story began sometime in May: a certain user vchk, blogging on the Russian sector of the Livejournal site, uploaded an old Soviet propaganda poster that had a Slavic child against the backdrop of a dead woman and a burning village. The inscription was supposed to read "Daddy, kill a German!" But vchk -- or whoever messed with the original -- wrote it the cute way: Kill a NATO soldier.
Then, about a month and a half ago, after an anonymous denunciation to Livejournal's now infamous Abuse Team led to the guy's blog getting closed down, several politically-minded bloggers, including a mathematician named Mikhail Verbitsky (the now-defunct user Tiphareth), organized a virtual flashmob in support of Livejournal's first Russian political victim. Dozens of people started posting "Ubei NATOvtsa" or "Ubei NATO" in solidarity. The provocation -- as some called it -- led to a massacre indeed: according to unofficial estimates, some 20-30 blogs -- including Tiphareth's -- were deleted for indecency, violence, or violations of the Abuse Team's Terms of Service. Some were restored after users deleted the offensive posts, while some, like Tiphareth, proudly refused and took their blogging business elsewhere.
There's also an accompanying article in the same issue of the eXile that describes the Russian Livejournal community as more intellectually vibrant than the American one. The author argues that all the most talented bloggers in Russia all congregated at LiveJournal, creating a blog hub black hole that once it got started had a powerful magnetic pull... something along the lines of what the Scoop group-blog format has done for the discourses on everything from the Oakland A's to the Democratic Party.
]]>The LiveJournal has more than three million American users, with an average age about 18 years old. It is the usual teenage stuff -- bitching about boyfriends, "Got sooo wasted at Jim's place last night," "I am starting a new job tomorrow, bagging at CostCo." Only a tiny percentage of these blogs is of any interest to more than a dozen of blogger's immediate friends.
The Russian LiveJournal domain is different. For some reason since the beginning (around 2001) it has attracted a disproportionably high number of the "Who's Who" in the informational and cultural space -- journalists, writers, publishers, politicians, etc. Russian is the largest non-English domain of the LiveJournal, with almost 200,000 accounts. Most of it is dross, like anywhere else. Nevertheless it is incomparably more engrossing than the American version. In the American domain one can jump from one blog to another for hours without encountering anything particularly eye-catching. Once you get in the Russian domain, within two or three clicks you'll find something memorable -- an outrageous sex diary, some really edgy photos or drawings, a sharp political commentary.
It does not mean, of course, that America doesn't have interesting blogs -- there are quite a lot of them, but its blogspaces are much more fragmented, whereas Russian blogs are more concentrated on the LJ.
In fact I don't remember such a robust nation-wide internet political community (bringing together broad intellectual elite with their readers in a single space) since the days of the IntelectualCapital.com, which ended with the Internet bubble; incidentally, its only foreign edition was in Russian. Yet even the Intellectual Capital in the best days barely had 10% of the fun of the Russian LJ now.
"Over the next few months, Democrats.org will add more tools and features -- including event listings of Democratic activities on the national, regional and state level and new event organizing tools."
Still to come. Where have I heard that before? After looking at the site for a while, I can't find much here that's different from the old Democrats.org, except that there's the Democracy Bond -- (read here monthly political subscriptions), but that isn't great web design, just a marketing concept.
While the world waits for the organizing tools to arrive, how about a simple directory of links to the state parties -- they often list their local events with some efficiency -- with a subdirectory listing for contacts to county chairs? It would give at least some appearance that the Democrats are including the web in their 50-state strategy.
]]>"Over the next few months, Democrats.org will add more tools and features -- including event listings of Democratic activities on the national, regional and state level and new event organizing tools."
Still to come. Where have I heard that before? After looking at the site for a while, I can't find much here that's different from the old Democrats.org, except that there's the Democracy Bond -- (read here monthly political subscriptions), but that isn't great web design, just a marketing concept.
While the world waits for the organizing tools to arrive, how about a simple directory of links to the state parties -- they often list their local events with some efficiency -- with a subdirectory listing for contacts to county chairs? It would give at least some appearance that the Democrats are including the web in their 50-state strategy.
]]>]]>The focus is on Convio, Inc., an Austin-based company that made its name last year providing web services to the Dean campaign.
It began Friday afternoon, when John Aravosis' AMERICAblog linked to a little-noticed Washington Post article revealing that Convio has begun working for The Alliance For Marriage, a major advocate of the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Aravosis contends that in doing so, Convio is violating its own "Right To Be Heard Policy," which promises that Convio "does not work with groups that promote prejudice and hate even if they are in full compliance with the law."
John called for a left-wing boycott of Convio. The call was picked up by trendsetters like Daily Kos and Atrios, followed by a host of other political blogs. The chatter promises to only get bigger....
]]>The focus is on Convio, Inc., an Austin-based company that made its name last year providing web services to the Dean campaign.
It began Friday afternoon, when John Aravosis' AMERICAblog linked to a little-noticed Washington Post article revealing that Convio has begun working for The Alliance For Marriage, a major advocate of the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Aravosis contends that in doing so, Convio is violating its own "Right To Be Heard Policy," which promises that Convio "does not work with groups that promote prejudice and hate even if they are in full compliance with the law."
John called for a left-wing boycott of Convio. The call was picked up by trendsetters like Daily Kos and Atrios, followed by a host of other political blogs. The chatter promises to only get bigger....
The Times' announcement that it would start charging for its Op-Ed content and columnists starting this September provoked a response from Kos that he would stop linking to the opinion pages, and also that "in this world of endless punditry, everyone is easily replaceable." Hundreds of other bloggers chimed in with similar thoughts.
Putting a barrier to content by subscription certainly dampens the amount of attention that bloggers give to a news outlet (for a rough example, compare on Technorati that there are more than 300,000 links to the reg-req. New York Times and 50,000 for subscription only Wall Street Journal), especially in an online news environment where so much of the content is free.
]]>The Times' announcement that it would start charging for its Op-Ed content and columnists starting this September provoked a response from Kos that he would stop linking to the opinion pages, and also that "in this world of endless punditry, everyone is easily replaceable." Hundreds of other bloggers chimed in with similar thoughts.
Putting a barrier to content by subscription certainly dampens the amount of attention that bloggers give to a news outlet (for a rough example, compare on Technorati that there are more than 300,000 links to the reg-req. New York Times and 50,000 for subscription only Wall Street Journal), especially in an online news environment where so much of the content is free.
But let's say that more and more papers move to charging for online access. What will happen next I think is that a blogging culture will predominate where one person with one subscription to a news outlet will take it upon themselves to crib articles of interest on their own blog. Some of them might do it on a systematic, perhaps even automated basis, citing "fair use." One subscriber can give access to everyone. Individuals who want to read the papers that day might instead go to Technorati to read the Times and the other papers.
It's already what I do when I want to find an article from the Wall Street Journal. One outcome of this is that more and more folks will read the Times without ever going to its site. Another is that these readers won't be hit by the ads waiting for them at NYT.com. Yet another is that major news providers decision to withdraw from the free news online arena will give space for new authoritative newsmakers to emerge.
The two ways to prevent systematic cribbing on news sites that I can think of is to make the site just accessible enough for bloggers to be lazy/discouraged to take the trouble to copy and paste content (like Salon does with its just-about-tolerable ad portals) or to make it physically very difficult or inconvenient to pull content off a web page (say in the way that it's sometimes hard to pull text from a .pdf document).
Blogging is to the news industry what open source software has been to Microsoft: a wealth killer. And while there will likely be plenty of coming law suits to protect content and limit the definition of fair use, the ubiquity of web-publishing tools won't be able to stop the tide. Hugh Hewitt mentioned at the PDF conference that he thinks that group blogs are dangerous because of the liability a host might incur when other users crib and post proprietary content. I wonder about that. Perennial cribbers like CommonDreams have been at it for years, with zero lightning struck.
Any serious attempts to prevent bloggers from cribbing content I think would result in some of the largest solidarity protests ever seen: Imagine a case where an individual is sued for posting a New York Times column on their blog; millions of bloggers end up posting the same column on their site.
At the registration part of Kos' blog appears "© 2005. Steal what you want." I think he has it right.
]]>Of course, it's common practice for advocacy groups to pad their member lists anyway they can. The predominance of internet advocacy means this will get only worse. And the meaning of "member" has been diluted to the extent that for many groups, it means giving your e-mail address, or just a dollar for the cause.
An article from the Houston Voice looks at the Human Rights Campaign and how it justifies its claim of 650,000 members:
]]>Of course, it's common practice for advocacy groups to pad their member lists anyway they can. The predominance of internet advocacy means this will get only worse. And the meaning of "member" has been diluted to the extent that for many groups, it means giving your e-mail address, or just a dollar for the cause.
An article from the Houston Voice looks at the Human Rights Campaign and how it justifies its claim of 650,000 members:
"HRC’s bylaws provide that “any revenue of $1 or more received by [HRC] from an individual or association, whether as a gift or payment for goods and services delivered by [HRC], shall constitute dues” for a member.
This means that someone who donated a dollar or made a small purchase from the HRC store years ago is considered from that time forward an HRC member, even in death unless HRC specifically learns of the person’s demise.
Over the last quarter century, HRC has confirmed the deaths of approximately 4,000 “members,” and the addresses for another 44,000 are no longer valid and are not included in the total membership figure. Otherwise, it takes a specific request to be deleted from HRC’s membership rolls.
The HRC does make a distinction between regular and "active" members, but how many active ones are there?
Another class of HRC supporters, called “active members,” includes those who are current with an annual dues payment of just $5, even though the HRC Web site asks for a minimum payment of $35 to join the organization.
The number of “active members” is much smaller than the number of “members” since “active members” are required to pay dues annually and includes only those who currently have done so. Also, the purchase of an pin or T-shirt from HRC would not qualify a person as an “active member.”
HRC declined to provide any figures on “active members,” currently or historically.
“We do know the current number of ‘active members,’” said [Spokesperson Steven] Fisher, “but we don’t publish it because our enemies would love to know.”
Yep. Keep it secret from The Enemy.
The big problem with padding members by including those who've given just a dollar or their e-mail address -- especially when the org. is known to do so -- is that it makes ignoring a large advocacy group politically feasable. Ironically, it also weakens the voice of the real "active members" who've chosen to express themselves through the vehicle of the advocacy group that pads its rolls.
]]>Only one of the big three, the Lib Dems, has bothered to spend any sort of budget online. They bought up banner inventory on newspaper websites and invested in some online search marketing, particularly on keywords relating to the Conservative party and its leader, Michael Howard.
]]>The clever thing about using pay for placement advertising with Google (as the Lib Dems have) is that many websites utilise Google's Adsense product that displays contextual advertising (in effect, what is relevant to the content). So an article on the Conservative leader that is featured on Times Online in the past week or so might have contained an ad saying something like, "Michael Howard? The Lib Dems are the Real Alternative".
Only one of the big three, the Lib Dems, has bothered to spend any sort of budget online. They bought up banner inventory on newspaper websites and invested in some online search marketing, particularly on keywords relating to the Conservative party and its leader, Michael Howard.
The clever thing about using pay for placement advertising with Google (as the Lib Dems have) is that many websites utilise Google's Adsense product that displays contextual advertising (in effect, what is relevant to the content). So an article on the Conservative leader that is featured on Times Online in the past week or so might have contained an ad saying something like, "Michael Howard? The Lib Dems are the Real Alternative".
]]>However, the Lib Dems miss a trick because they forward users to their online donation page, rather than any content proving that voting Conservative could be a mistake. Online donations are important for a political party, but shouldn't they be trying to win votes, especially at a cost per click of as low as 2p.
If you create a group blog composed of the likes of Warren Beatty, Walter Cronkite, and James Fallows, everyone will read it, won't they? They will at first, that's for sure. There's something to be said for the celebrity effect of blogging, in the way that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a following with his Blog Maverick. Personally, I look forward to RSSing Gart Hart's musings.
But I think the Huffington Post will eventually deal a great deal of harm to pundit celebrity because these elites have shed the media that distributed them to fame, and jumped into an arena where any "anonymous individual" has access to the same tools they do to communicate, imitate, and criticize.
]]>If you create a group blog composed of the likes of Warren Beatty, Walter Cronkite, and James Fallows, everyone will read it, won't they? They will at first, that's for sure. There's something to be said for the celebrity effect of blogging, in the way that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a following with his Blog Maverick. Personally, I look forward to RSSing Gart Hart's musings.
But I think the Huffington Post will eventually deal a great deal of harm to pundit celebrity because these elites have shed the media that distributed them to fame, and jumped into an arena where any "anonymous individual" has access to the same tools they do to communicate, imitate, and criticize.
Additionally, I don't understand why there's any sense of competition between Drudge and what Arianna has going. The Drudge Report is a human-powered news aggregator with a few hundred permalinks at the bottom. The Huffington Post sounds like a blog newspaper. Is this just good MSM and Web PR on Arianna's part?
If you had the time, staff, and resources (and Lord, I pray for it every day) to filter through the nine million blogs out there and aggregate the 5,000 best "anonymous" writers under one roof in the rough form of a newspaper site like the New York Times, the Huffington Post would get a serious run for its money, as would any other online journalistic outlet.
]]>The blog is displays photos from flickr.com of the "Cedar Revolution" in progress, uses a comments tool,
The site has the feel of something cooked up in an IRI or NDI cubicle (see the "about" section). And the only news site Pulse of Freedom refers to is the the Daily Star, an English paper printed in Lebanon and other Middle East countries affiliated with the International Herald Tribune.
]]>The blog is displays photos from flickr.com of the "Cedar Revolution" in progress, uses a comments tool,
The site has the feel of something cooked up in an IRI or NDI cubicle (see the "about" section). And the only news site Pulse of Freedom refers to is the the Daily Star, an English paper printed in Lebanon and other Middle East countries affiliated with the International Herald Tribune.
I was pointed to Pulse of Freedom by Spirit of America (via Truth Laid Bear), a cause supported by private businesses that aides U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In its own words: "We contributed equipment to Iraqi-owned television stations to establish a better alternative to Al Jazeera. We helped Iraqi men whose arms were amputated by Saddam Hussein get a new start on life." And they "contribute charitable goods that can have a positive, practical and timely impact in the local communities where American personnel are involved." Who says "personnel" other than personnel?
[UPDATE] What do you know? The folks who are doing the tech work for Pulse of Freedom are none other than... EchoDitto, a cast of former Dean web staffers (former fellow coworkers).
]]>That's Democrat Jim McDermott's -- in what seems to be his best imitation of Ahab -- rant on the House Ethics Committee. McDermott has shed the direct (e-)mailese that abounds among politicos who've dipped their toes in campaign blogs and elsewhere.
At least three other House Dems have written diaries on DailyKos -- Louise Slaughter, John Conyers, and Anthony Weiner (who have I missed?). Why wouldn't they post entries on Kos? It's probably one of the first blogs that they heard of, they are treated reverentially in the comments, and Kos often highlights their work in the front page section. Of course, what these representatives all have in common is that they are among the more liberal members in the House. What they also all have in common is that they started around the same time. McDermott was first on March 4 this year, then Slaughter March 28, Conyers on April 6, and Weiner... on the same day. I've contacted to these offices to find out what prompted the Kossing, so I'll report back when I find out.
]]>That's Democrat Jim McDermott's -- in what seems to be his best imitation of Ahab -- rant on the House Ethics Committee. McDermott has shed the direct (e-)mailese that abounds among politicos who've dipped their toes in campaign blogs and elsewhere.
At least three other House Dems have written diaries on DailyKos -- Louise Slaughter, John Conyers, and Anthony Weiner (who have I missed?). Why wouldn't they post entries on Kos? It's probably one of the first blogs that they heard of, they are treated reverentially in the comments, and Kos often highlights their work in the front page section. Of course, what these representatives all have in common is that they are among the more liberal members in the House. What they also all have in common is that they started around the same time. McDermott was first on March 4 this year, then Slaughter March 28, Conyers on April 6, and Weiner... on the same day. I've contacted to these offices to find out what prompted the Kossing, so I'll report back when I find out.
[UPDATE] A staffer for Conyers, Ted Kalo, told me that it was complete coincedence that Weiner and Conyers posted on Kos on the same day, but that Conyers and Slaughter are in dialogue to come with ways to pursue blogging. Kalo said that Conyers was inspired to create his own blog based on what he saw from the Dean campaign -- surprise! -- and how bloggers got around the media in during the Ohio recount. Of greater interest is that Conyers and his blog readers co-authored an editorial for BuzzFlash.com. That's a first for a member of Congress, I'll warrant. Kalo described it this way: "This exercise was an example of the synthesis that blogs can produce between a politician-blogger and his readers."
Both Slaughter and Weiner have posted comments and responded in detail to questions, and they are fairly savvy in their use. Weiner has gone into some detail about where he stands on issues relating to his New York mayoral bid. Conyers even cross-posted from his blog, letting readers know about his diary on Kos.
All of the Representatives have a clear voice in their writing, but I suspect it will be harder for the less adventuresome Reps in Congress to drop the formality.
]]>