Trying 2
ArchPundit
Let’s try no weird stuff in the repost
Blog
Don’t Call It A Comeback
It might be but let’s not jinx it. test
Site Updates
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been performing some updates on the site.
I moved to a new host and am very happy with it, but I also put some maintenance in on a bunch of features including the feeds which are much improved and now includes a comment feed. You’ll also notice the favicon if you bookmark the site and and the feeds include more branding. Also, a bunch of features have been added to each post from Feedburner in each post both on the site and in the feed.
Finally, you can sign up for a daily e-mail with the posts from AP in it down on the right hand column.
So buy some advertising 😉
Navel Gazing
Rich wrote up a nice piece about blogs in both the IL 18 and IL 3 race. It’s hard to think of a more supportive semi-traditional journalist than Rich is with blogs.
Lipinski has strong opposition from Mark Pera in the upcoming Democratic primary. Pera’s cause is being championed by liberal Democratic blogs all over the country, so every local story that trashes Lipinski is put in front of hundreds of thousands of eyeballs that otherwise wouldn’t see them.
As a result, Daily Southtown columnist Kristen McQueary now has a whole lot more fans than she did before the campaign season began. That coverage, in turn, has raised big campaign bucks for Pera when highlighted by the national blogs.
Congressional campaigns aren’t the only races being affected by blogs. A blogger in Lake County (“Team America”) was the first to report concerns about state Sen. Terry Link’s nominating petitions.
Apparently, a couple of dead people “signed” the petitions, as did one of Link’s former Republican opponents. Oops. The seriousness of the situation was overstated, but the local media picked up the story almost right away.
Bloggers in Illinois and nationally are expressing interest in Daniel Biss’ campaign for the Illinois House. Biss faces an uphill race in a district represented by popular Republican incumbent state Rep. Beth Coulson, but he’s raising a ton of cash because he has paid so much attention to online media.
I’m not a blog triumphalist, but I do think they matter and are generally positive.
One aspect of criticism that I find particularly irksome is the argument that blogs are just random people who you cannot trust. Any source of news and information should be viewed with healthy skepticism and blogs are especially susceptible to making errors since there is only one line of review. Me included. That said, many journalists do a very good job, but with the exception of maybe Rich Miller and Aaron Chambers, they cannot give you much on bureaucratic rule making. It’s a fairly detailed area and unless someone has followed a story through it, making heads nor tails of the process is difficult. And many who cover daily politics understand daily politics pretty well, but not so much when it comes down to questions of the State Constitution or federalism issues.
Those aren’t horrible characteristics, they are a natural outgrowth of what they have to specialize for in regards to reporting. On the other hand, I have a fairly good grasp of rule making and federalism at the state level because my area of interest academically is just that area.
In the same way, many reporters are good consumers of polls. Lynn Sweet is a good example as are the two others mentioned above. However, they don’t actually do polling or have the grasp of it that Charles Franklin does at Pollster.com and Politiccal Arithmetik (both linked in the blogroll. Charles is displaying specific work related to his area of research and it’s by far the best accessible way to understand how polls compare to each other and offer a good estimate of the underlying state of public opinion. I’m far less accomplished than Charles, but I do a lot of work on the wording of survey questions and especially a lot on internal validity of instruments. Not many reporters do that.
Obviously Charles and I run very different types of sites. Mine is more personal and aimed at activism, his is more a place to allow his professional work to be accessible. This is true of many types of people though with biologists populating a lot of the evolution blogosphere, economists of all stripes, and lawyers galore–that’s a bit more mixed of a group.
Not everyone with a blog has a particular expertise in what they are blogging about though and that’s okay. Not all reporters have a particular expertise in what they are reporting–I kid–I actually respect most of the Illinois press corps. Those that aren’t the Publisher’s relative at least.
The point being that more information and more views should enhance civic life, not be a danger to it. Sure, there will be bad information from time to time on blogs. Like the stuff that appeared in the NY Times that helped get us into Iraq. Or Bob Novak. Readers get a sense of reliability though and they can determine the quality of information over time. Some sites remain crap, but that crap audience was out there before the internets They even overlook really dumb decisions from time-to-time as long as the proper corrections and apologies take place and lessons learned. Trust me on that one–I know.
Nobody really knows where this is all leading, but it’s obvious that if you want to know the rest of the story about any issue, big or small, you have to go online.
And that’s true, but I think there is every reason to be positive about the future and blogging. Making information more accessible is a good thing and it ultimately means better coverage as more coverage is created and more perspectives come to reporting.
Let’s Review Commenting
It’s fine to post support for someone, but you only get to do it as one identity. I will delete comments made by the same IP with different identities. If you change from time to time that isn’t so bad, but in the same day or same thread, not cool.
Second, the only other thing I take very seriously is if a campaign is being dishonest about posting. If you want to post anonymously–go for it–keep one identity if you do. But don’t pretend to be a random person when posting from blahblah2008.com. Just make the point without setting yourself up as some sort of random person who just happen to have heard about Candidate blahblah.
Other than that–your IPs and identities are perfectly safe.
The Case of the Missing Power Cord
Someone took my power cord to my laptop while at a conference, we’ll be returning to regularly scheduled programming soon.
5 Years
ArchPundit began on August 23rd of 2002. Thanks to all of the readers over the years.
Another Blogroll Update
Added Wonkish and taxtales (Doug Kane) to the blog roll. Take a look at both, they have some excellent discussion of tax issues that doesn’t revolve around the simplistic taxes bad.
Blogrolls and Stuff
As many of you know Atrios, Markos, and The General all redid their blogrolls and I was eliminated from all three. I kind of expected it and I’m fine with it-Markos says it best with the following:
To me, that’s a slap in the face of every new blog that was added. Rather than celebrate the fact that a whole new generation of blogs gets a little recognition, some (and that doesn’t include most bloggers pulled from the blogroll) apparently had a bizarre sense of entitlement. Everything in a blog is in constant motion. Nothing is static. That’s the beauty of the medium. And now the blogroll will reflect that spirit — constantly evolving as the blogosphere itself changes.
It’s a good thing when blogrolls change–there will be some great new sites to discover.
On Marcotte and Edwards
While it isn’t resolved, Josh Marshall makes the point I’d like to see taken away from this:
Given how edgy blog writing is (some more than others), it seems inevitable that bloggers who go to work for campaigns will get their past writings scrutinized and then have their employers dogged to fire them. If there’s anything that surprises me about this dust-up with the Edwards campaign, it’s this. Is it really possible that they hadn’t figured out who they were hiring, figured something like this would happen and planned for how they would react if and when it did?
That said, the ‘incendiary’ quotes I just heard referenced on CNN didn’t really strike me as all that incendiary. And second, Bill Donohue? Chief rabblerouser and bullyboy of the ‘Catholic League’? Please. I think he gave up his ‘incendiary’ language complaint rights when he said that ” “Hollywood likes anal sex” or that “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.” I can’t wait till he comes with the dig that gets Jews, Christians and anal sex all into one long smoldering sentence.
Please. Please. Please. Let’s get someone on the right to complain who’s not a complete nutball and Jew-basher and then we can talk.
If you are a campaign hiring a blogger you have to do your due diligence and that includes ensuring what they have written is something you can live with. This might entail looking at the writings and insisting on something apologizing for some over the top language/idea, it might be simply getting ready for the inevitable right wing smears, or it might be deciding to go a different direction.
The Edwards campaign could have quashed this days ago and earned points doing it by having Amanda make a statement concerning the posts in question and preemptively dealing with it. When the whines started, it’s a dead story and simply don’t comment on it again. They didn’t and now they have let it languish and build up steam to get on cable news. That’s mismanaging the story and it has a lot in the blogosphere on edge largely because they see it as a betrayal to Amanda. Killing the story would have been easy, but now by being wishy-washy, the story continues taking away from the day’s message and getting coverage for loons on CNN and Fox.
Being prepared means preempting the idiots. But once you screw up, don’t back down.