Putting the blogosphere under a magnifying glass
You probably think this presidential campaign is about you:
I mean, really. Joe Biden’s face appears seven, count em, seven times at the top of the main page of his website. Is that really the first thing you want to overwhelm voters with when they sign for the first time?
I hate to break it to you Senator, but Time’s Person of the Year was a metaphor.
If you consider yourself a fan of both Wikipedia and “The Colbert Report,” a kind of cognitive dissonance is inescapable at times — and Monday night was one of those times.
The first was last August, when the faux winger unleashed upon Wikipedia his so-called Colbert Nation — an unknown percentage of his audience willing to carry out simple online tasks (e.g voting in online polls) at Colbert’s request — to make two specific Wikipedia edits: that Colbert’s opinion of Oregon is that it is “Idaho’s Portugal” rather than “California’s Canada” or “Washington’s Mexico,” and that the number of African elephants in the wild had tripled over the last six months (you’d have to see it, but alas, as I advised against, it has been removed from YouTube). The Nation responded, causing headaches for Wikipedia editors and administrators that persist to this day.
On Monday Colbert struck again. While the segment isn’t on YouTube, it is available through Comedy Central, thereby meeting a minimum standard of web literacy but (surprisingly for this show) failing to understand why increased fan control over the content is a good idea. There is an embedding capability to let fans put the videos on their own sites, but the back end is terrible. Just click on the image below — or better yet, open it in another tab:
The subject this time was the recent controversy about Microsoft paying an independent contractor to correct perceived errors on Wikipedia. It’s a new issue and a complicated one, but for now suffice to say that my take is closer to the TWiTters‘ than Michael Arrington’s.
“The Colbert Report,” being the late-night comedy it is, went with the same angle as last time, per the show’s website (image has been altered to remove other segment panels):
I digress.
In the August and latest segments’ opening moments, Colbert announced the night’s Word. Last time it was “Wikiality,” this time it was “Wikilobbying” — and instantly, throughout the Eastern time zone, fingertips fell upon keyboards: was there an entry for Wikilobbying yet?
At that point, no. In those first five seconds (or so) I was one of several hundred, possibly even a couple thousand, Internet users requesting that file. And of that crowd, the quickest-fingertipped member of the Colbert Nation exhibited the same wit that brought us “Frist!” and Fitz!”:
I hit refresh. Moments later, another loyal vandal referenced the recurring migraine mentioned above:
Among those thousand or few who turned up inside of the segment, a handful were actual Wikipedians who had obviously expected this:
Remember, maybe a minute has passed, and Colbert hadn’t specifically asked anyone to do anything. But then he did. According to Colbert, Microsoft’s actions tampered with the very concept of reality itself, and so this time he issued a specific directive:
Actually, this vandal was either a moron or a poor typist, because what Colbert actually asked for was:
Reality has become a commodity
Multiple Wikipedia administrators went into action, cleaning up the mess…
…and even correcting their own mistakes:
One of the great things about Colbert’s show is the audience participation enabled by the Internet. Colbert’s “feud” with Oregon’s own The Decemberists grew out of similarly-themed user-generated video contests. I enjoyed the “green screen challenges” — those were creative. The Wikipedia onslaught may be harmless insofar as pages are immediately fixable and reliably fixed, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t destructive. Not to mention, Colbert’s pranks reinforce overwrought fears about the website’s supposed vulnerability.
But think of Wikipedia like the Internet itself. The structure of the network and the community of editors is redundant by its nature. If one thing goes wrong and even if many things go wrong, the corrections are usually prompt. Yes, they’re less reliable along outlying nodes and even some overtrafficked ones. Neither claimed to be without flaws, yet both will withstand virtually any attack (save electromagnetic pulse).
You have to be a loser with no life — or a late-night comedian and his his unblinking minions — to think vandalizing Wikipedia is a good idea. And it provides further evidence for all the comparisons to “The O’Reilly Factor,” Colbert’s program is not just a parody of O’Reilly’s fanbase, it is the mob they presume to be parodying.
Reading this story at The Politico the other day made me chuckle. It’s vintage Iowa:
Pat named her cat Hillary and when she heard that Hillary, the presidential candidate, was coming to town, she got a friend to help her and they managed to get Hillary (the cat) to make a paw print on a picture of Hillary (the cat) to give Hillary (the candidate.) … She also said, “I have never heard a national candidate with such a fine-tuned knowledge of children. Thank you for your service to children.”
Hillary voter, right?
“I am not satisfied with her explanation about the Iraq war,” Pat said. But come on. After the cat, the blue eyes, the paw print, the red blazer, the knowledge of children, the 12 TV cameras and international press corps taking down every word, after all this, you are really not going to commit to Hillary? “Well, she is one of my top three,” Pat said.
It doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, how much money you have or how much star power you bring to the table. They don’t care if you are not right on their issues.
These are votes you have to earn.
And there’s a very simple reason about why they are able to put you through the ringer to earn that vote: the caucus rules.
The rules are very complicated and the longer someone is a participant, the better they know them. Rural areas can yield you as many delegates as urban ones because of the previous year’s attendance and because many committed activists over a large area are grouped together into a caucus location. You have to attend a 3 or 4 hour meeting to cast your vote and then the viability rule might nullify your first choice.
Then the real fun kicks in. Every staffer who’s ever set foot in Iowa will tell you a story about the one “activist” you had to get because that guy or gal was the person who could reel in the delegates who pick candidates that don’t meet the viability rule.
Markos and other bloggers don’t like this system.
Sometimes I wonder why. After all, there’s something special about a group of people who both have power and are unimpressed by it.
Technorati is the best-known and likely most-used blog search engine, and while it is arguably the best overall, it isn’t the best for everything. Google BlogSearch lets you isolate searches according to period of time; Technorati does not do this. And IceRocket has a trend tool that lets you compare up to three different search terms; Technorati will chart just one term at a time.
The IceRocket trend tool can be a great deal of fun, and will tell you how certain search terms compare over the last month, two months or three months. And as interest ramps up in the 2008 presidential election, it might be worth seeing how much attention each of the current White House hopefuls have generated in the blogosphere. That’s what we’re doing here today.
Below is a series of charts organizing these candidates into a handful of categories — by party, by legitimacy, and then, we’ll see how the top contenders in each category stack up — measuring some combination of name recognition and intensity of interest, whether positive or negative:
Of course, we are only measuring raw mentions with no value judgments attached. The only thing we know for sure is that Democrats are getting more play than Republicans. My assumption from reading blogs on both sides is that Republicans are discussing Democratic candidates more than Democrats are the Republicans. Though the universally-known Hillary Clinton obviously has been the most-mentioned, at least half of those discussions (and probably more) are non-supportive. The same is largely true of McCain, although I’d wager he is mentioned less often by liberals than Hillary is by conservatives.
These are limited findings based on limited tools. Take them all with a healthy dose of skepticism, and remember that this is only a one-month snapshot early in the process. We don’t even know how many of these mentions come from plugged-in, “political” blogs as opposed to online journals at Blogspot, LiveJournal and MySpace. Perhaps the lopsided interest in Democratic candidates comes from casual commentators who know Hillary best and find Obama intriguing. A more in-depth analysis could answer these questions.
But again, it is early. Very early. I will follow up again in coming months, and I invite readers to run their own trend searches. And please add any further insights in the comments.
Chris seems to have a problem with people like me getting money from the blogosphere:
[T]he same Democratic political consultant structure that the netroots seek to reform… is actually being funded, reinforced, and strengthened by the netroots.
Like I’ve argued before, I think I’m pretty good at this. My full-time job is helping Democrats win. I love politics, I work hard, I’m pretty good at figuring people out and the clients I help elect support most of your agenda. Where we differ is that I think Mark Pryor should get some leeway. He’s from a red state after all; he needs to vote the way his constituents want (he does, after all, represent them). I do a little more top-down management than bottom-up, but I fully support both methods. I also see flaws in both methods. And, we agree more often then you would think, e.g. Joe Lieberman should get a swift kick in the junk for undermining the Democratic party.
Bloggers see overall numbers like $1.85 billion and get mad that political professionals get all that money. Hey, I do it, too. Ever see a piece of crap car commercial on TV and think about the money wasted on that advertising firm? Ever say to yourself, “I could do better than that!”?
There’s one problem with that kind of armchair quarterbacking: it’s a selective view. You need to judge the entire body of work a firm produces, what actually went into the production (clients drastically ruin (and improve) work all the time), the amount of material to work with and a whole host of other factors.
The point is this, Chris: we get paid well because that’s what the market has dictated. Nobody gets forced into using a particular pollster, mail firm or TV firm. We have to go pitch clients, cold call people that qualify for the ballot, and we face some pretty fierce competition in the industry every day. Lots of new firms have been opening up because there is a ton of business at the state and local level that was never there before (by the way, that’s where the real money is). And the Internet is making more information available all the time. More information equals more informed decisions.
Do people make money and viability decisions based on which firm you pick? Absolutely. Anyone who’s a consistent giver knows brand name firms. Just like you know Miller Lite but you might not know the Dead Guy.
Experience, name and reputation mean something in this world. That’s why the big firms have big market share and that’s why they make big money. And this notion that we don’t support the same principles and goals is just bullshit. We just don’t listen to everything you and the so-called netroots say (something which I don’t even think really has a good definition yet).
That said, I do agree with you on a major point. I think you deserve a lot more money than you guys are getting for your work:
Matt Stoller, has previously written about examples of full-time progressive movement activists who receive little or no compensation for their work. … local progressive bloggers typically lose money on blogging every year, even as they help transform local media and activist scenes. … As a handful of progressive bloggers are criticized for picking up the occasional establishment consulting job, the progressive netroots as a whole funnels exponentially more money into the establishment while receiving virtually no help in return when it comes to building our movement. … I am also pissed off at the Democratic and progressive establishment that is funded with our dollars, but which refuses to fund us in return.
I’ve said before, you deserve better because you provide a service (the part about leaked polling numbers). We politico/consultant types love politics and you provide us with discussion material all the time. Before, we had to wait for Meet the Press to air, or catch our updates from Inside Poltics. We had to subscribe to Roll Call, the Evans-Novak Report or (those of us that worked for rich lobbyists or big NGO’s) National Journal and CQ.
You’re providing most of this stuff for free and we should find a way to support good advertisers that are catering to what we want. I promise you this: when I start my own political consulting firm, I’ll buy a Blogad. And I have a feeling that one day, when you get a pitch from my firm for a race you may be running, you may just think I deserve a buck or two for my services.
*And, to be fair, why you deserve mine.
Kos says no. Well, more like not so much.
I think the definition of “netroots” is the only answer to this sort of question.
I consider myself part of the netroots insofar as that’s where I get a majority of my news. I’ve been a reader since 2002, and I frequently vote in the netroots polls. But, I don’t really post (except here and only in the last 6 months on the invitation of Mr. Beutler) or comment and I don’t give any money. My philosophy probably also doesn’t fit neatly with the netroots. I’m philosophically pretty liberal, but more of an institutionalist than say, Atrios.
So, does Hillary get to claim all her accomplishments as “netroots” support or is Kos right that most of the netroots don’t support her?
Depends on the definition, I guess. Obama is breaking new ground as well, but neither is he leading the polls at dKos.
I guess I don’t know what net-roots means, and I don’t know how to spell it, either.
In a feature published Monday, PC World counted up the “Top 10 Internet Scandals of All Time.” Though most items on the list come from the world of business (two stories about the music industry’s anti-piracy tactics) and entertainment (two stories about Paris Hilton) they devoted the final three to politics and the media.
In order as announced, PC World considers the top three Internet scandals to be: The blogger-led debunking of CBS’s report on Bush’s Guard service, 3. Dan Rather Bids a Font Farewell; the revelation of then-Rep. Mark Foley’s inappropriate e-mails to minor staffers, 2. A Real Page Turner, and the Drudge Report publishing Newsweek’s spiked story about Monica Lewinsky, 1. Monica-gate and Whitewater.
You’ll get no argument from me about number one… except that author Dan Tynan seems a little confused about which scandal led to the other:
The Lewinsky scandal put the Internet on hyperalert, drawing its attention to an ongoing and arguably bigger scandal called Whitewater.
Dan, Wikipedia is there for a reason. Use it.
But to main the point: Mark Foley’s resignation is a bigger deal than Dan Rather’s? Come again? Heck, Foley even happened on an off-year election. Nobody outside of politics knew who Foley before the scandal, and now he’s a punchline on late-night TV. Dan Rather, on the other hand, was the anchor of the CBS Evening News, and now he’s… a punchline on late-night TV.
But even Tynan is careful not to oversell the case:
Foley’s disgrace may not have brought about the Republican electoral debacle last November, but it didn’t help his or his party’s cause.
And this is a bigger scandal than Yahoo and Google enabling censorship in China? I was about to write that PC World should stay out of politics, but that might be a bit hypocritical, considering the current venue. Instead, I’ll just suggest they develop a sense of proportion.
And don’t get me started on Forbes’ “The Web Celeb 25.” Jessica “Lonelygirl15″ Rose is #1?! If Forbes knows that Rose didn’t write, direct or edit the spots that made her (sort of) famous, they’re not telling. And Markos Moulitsas (#3) is more important than Matt Drudge (#4)? Please. We can debate this point when Daily Kos gets 16,132,714 visitors in a 24-hour period.
Besides, the real action at dKos isn’t his posts or even his hand-picked front-pagers, it’s in the user diaries. And they write:
To his legions of fans, he’s better known as “Kos,” an Army nickname that rhymes with “dose.” To conservative U.S. politicians, he’s known as a perpetual thorn in the side of the Republican Party.
Ha. To those who actually are familiar with the site, Kos is more a thorn in the side of the Democratic party. His book, “Crashing the Gate,” has almost nothing to say about Republicans except they’re really bad people. And you can imagine how aggrieved conservative U.S. politicians were when they heard… actually, they never heard that.
But I suppose they deserve some credit for knowing how to pronounce his name.
P.S. Yes, I realize this is essentially the same thing as complaining about Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” leaning way too hard on the 1960s and 70s. That is to say, that’s just what they want us to do.
Hillary Clinton did not wait long after her weekend presidential campaign announcement to step foot in the blogosphere: By Monday her technically fledgling but long-assumed campaign had taken major steps toward engaging web users, starting with her three-night series of half-hour webcasts, which concluded just last evening. Moreover, her camp had sought specifically to engage the dedicated online activists who call themselves the netroots, by promoting the webcasts through the industry standard Blogads service.
Her detractors among those online activists did not wait long, either. At MyDD, one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left, Matt Stoller criticized her team for purchasing ads on some conservative blogs:
Why do people like HRC, no matter how often it becomes clear that wingnuts hate us, seek approval from wingnuts?
Before long, another animadversion came from former Nevada [and current online] talk show host (and recent Stoller employee) Taylor Marsh, who was upset to find she had been left out:
It’s not like her team doesn’t know I exist. I find it a little annoying that Clinton’s team thinks that people like me don’t merit advertisement, simply because our numbers don’t reach the one-hundred thousand mark.
We’ll address the specifics of these charges, but in order to do so, first let’s try to describe the buy itself:
The Clinton team can’t or won’t say what they spent on the buy, but on Monday, Blog P.I. went digging through the extensive a la carte ordering page at Blogads to find out where they had made their buys and make a reasonably educated guess about how much they had spent.
While I am quite sure I did not locate every ad on every blog, the initial buy was worth at least $17,026 across at least 45 blogs. The buy comprised political blogs almost exclusively, liberal blogs overwhelmingly, and primarily those with a national reach. Nearly every liberal blog above 50,000 impressions per week picked up a blogad, though a few did not (as we’ll see below) and at least a few regional and small-traffic blogs also were included. The campaign bought some Premium ads (which are guaranteed to be the top ads visible) on liberal sites but generally stuck with the Standard ads, and went with the bargain buys on each of the conservative blogs included. And how many conservative blogs was that? I counted just four: Hugh Hewitt, Power Line, Captain’s Quarters and Wizbang Politics (i.e. not the front page), each worth between 550,000 and 150,000 impressions per week for a total $1,150.
Yesterday Blog P.I. contacted Clinton’s principal blog adviser, Peter Daou, for elaboration. As he explained, the first round was for the webcasts, the second round (which began last night) was for inviting supporters and potential supporters to submit guest blog posts. According to Daou, future buys will focus on particular issues Sen. Clinton wants to highlight, and in states and regions where she will be traveling. The strategy is not fixed, and more to the point, neither are the number of sites. “A blog being excluded has absolutely no implication, except we’ll get there next time,” Daou said. “We’ll try to get as many bloggers as possible.” For anyone who remembers Daou’s last gig, the blog roundup published by Salon which still bears his name, Daou often went out of his way to reach down and pull obscure blogs up into the mix. To be sure, he’s not spending his own money, and cheap as Blogads can be, even Hillary Clinton does not have unlimited funds. But to the extent he can, it’s reasonable to expect that Daou will keep doing so.
And on Wednesday night, hours after the final webcast, the ad strategy did indeed shift: At the same time the buy expanded on liberal blogs, it disappeared from the conservative sites. To the Clinton team, it made sense to get attention from the right when the focus was on the webcast, but now that the ads are inviting people to submit guest posts to her site, inviting the “winguts” would indeed be a waste of time. Had they not made this distinction here, Stoller’s gripe surely would have been right.
But here’s the interesting thing: Blogads buys are one-week minimum commitments, though advertisers can change the specific ad as many times as they want — or remove it entirely. This is just what they’ve done: In order to stick to the plan, they have no choice but to pay Power Line and the rest not to run the ad, at least for a few more days (surely someone will compare this to farm subsidies, but no one has; one might say they’re just not into her).
For example, here is a screen shot taken last night, confirming two ads running on Power Line:
But here is the Power Line sidebar as of last night:
Not that the ads necessarily earned anyone’s approval: Dean Barnett, Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger, took exception and* deemed it a misstep on Hillary’s part:
If Hillary is advertising to reach out to our core audience, she should save her money. I get your emails – I know none of you will be supporting Hillary in the Democratic primaries. … Presidential campaigns are often poorly and profligately run. Howard Dean, for instance, burned through a gazillion dollars getting absolutely no bang for his bucks and couldn’t tell you at the end of the day where all the money went.
Barnett surmised that Clinton’s “purchaser didn’t do his homework and decided that it would be a swell expenditure to run ads here and on Powerline” — but Barnett has been around the blogosphere (and was the Weekly Standard’s go-to guy on the leftosphere) long enough to know who Daou is, and to recognize that Daou would know exactly what to find at Power Line.
To this I will add just one more thing. On Tuesday, veteran Democratic operative and now Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told Hotline’s Blogometer:
We’re on some conservative sites because we’re not ceding any territory. We take nothing for granted.
To me this sounds a lot like the fighting spirit bloggers hold dearly — taking the fight to the other side’s camp. But that isn’t Sen. Clinton’s reputation with the netroots.
Now to Marsh’s complaint. Her site is currently worth 42,806 views per week, just below the point where buys were near-automatic. She and Daou disagree on whether or not the campaign attempted to buy on her site, but as I do not have sufficient evidence to make a judgment, I’ll stay out of that question. Rather, let’s look at the circumstances:
As I dug through Blogads earlier this week, I found that liberal blogs with considerably more readers than Marsh were also not included in the initial ad buy: Juan Cole, Sadly, No!, BartCop, This Modern World, After Downing Street and Burnt Orange Report among them. They did not complain, but when the ad focus shifted on Thursday night, some of them were brought into the fold. Now they’re even on the low-traffic personal blog of Matthew Gross, who happens to be John Edwards’ blog adviser. And, yes, Taylor Marsh.
Other blogs that arguably reach the same demographic but were excluded include TV Newser, not to mention some of Clinton’s constituents, Curbed and Gothamist. The latter snub is somewhat notable considering she did buy on Gothamist’s DC affiliate, DCist. Heck, why not buy on Cute Overload? That site reaches a lot of people, and certainly fits with her warm and fuzzy approach. Same goes for Treehugger. It’s these lifestyle blogs that seem to lie beyond the campaign’s purview, while the campaign is “rotating,” as Daou put it, ads throughout Advertise Liberally Blogad network. [Update: Charles Kuffner has a point.]
Additionally, Some of Marsh’s complaints are confusing to me. She wrote, for example:
Single proprietor bloggers may not get the traffic of the gigantic community blogs, but we do a lion share of the work out here as well. … Taking me out of the equation for a moment, shouldn’t Clinton at least help out a few of the small female only blogs, reaching out to females everywhere? You’d think that would be important to her.
Yet Feministing and Pam’s House Blend are just the kind of female-only blogs Marsh describes, and they were included. In fact, Pam’s House Blend along with female-led Firedoglake were among the few sites to pick up Premium ad buys. Similar complaints likewise were off-target. At MyDD, Texas Nate hit Clinton’s camp for not buying on a few specific regional blogs. One was Bleeding Iowa which, so far as I can tell, does not support Blogads.
And to editorialize for a moment, there is something unseemly about complaining that an advertiser did not buy ads on one’s site. Daou and the Clinton team are under no obligation to buy ads on anybody’s site. Yes, Marsh is a member of the netroots in good standing — she has worked for the SEIU and MyDD to cover a labor dispute in Las Vegas — but the same is true of dozens of other bloggers whom Clinton missed on the first round. As Daou said to me, it’s impossible to buy on every site. And at least as of this morning, Marsh has made no acknowledgment of her inclusion in the next phase of the Clinton ad buy.
If it’s not exactly extortion, it does betray the kind of myopic egocentrism that establishment Democrats use — sometimes as an excuse, sometimes not — to keep the netroots at bay.
It was probably inevitable that there would be pushback when Hillary Clinton sought to engage the blogosphere. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the netroots’ legitimate policy disagreements with her have led to reflexive negative reactions to virtually anything she does.
Here is an example, taken from MyDD this week: In a post titled “Playing the Electability Card,” Chris Bowers interprets a memo by Clinton pollster Mark Penn (as summarized by Newsday) — comparing his candidate favorably to her rivals — as playing the “electability card,” thereby denigrating the Democratic party as a whole and reinforcing Republican stereotypes. Problem is, there’s no Penn quote that clearly says this; the more plausible interpretation is that Hillary has more experience standing up to the kind of GOP attacks Bowers fears could be effective. Most perplexingly, the only Democrat whose “electability” is questioned in the Newsday article is Hillary — and in the second paragraph, no less. Although Penn’s claim that other campaigns are “stalled or falling” is dubious, there’s nothing scandalous about him putting Hillary Clinton in the best possible light. That is his job, after all.
Hillary Clinton’s longstanding position on the Iraq war puts her squarely at odds with the netroots, whose creation and cohesion owes more to the Iraq invasion and subsequent deterioration than any other issue. Short of a full apology, there’s nothing she can do. Even then, Edwards did that a long time ago, and Obama never supported it in the first place (though he never had to actually cast a vote on it).
Clinton’s online campaign must be one largely of damage control — managing expectations and placating bloggers who long ago made up their mind against her. Yet while Marsh and others (such as radio talker Ed Schultz) complain that she is not reaching out to progressives, through the webcast, blogads and forthcoming guest blogs, that’s exactly what she’s trying to do. Whether Clinton can soften the netroots opposition to her is an open question, but considering the uphill battle, it was probably wise to get started on it first thing.
Politicians in Washington tend to develop reputations. McCain is the maverick, Kennedy is the liberal lion and (one of my favorites), the most dangerous place in all of Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a camera.
Hillary has one, too, and her people absolutely go berserk if you say it in front of them: She doesn’t have a sincere bone in her entire body.
Stuff like this gives us ammunition:
Notice how she’s been giving interviews in a living room setting, on a couch, with her elbow up on the armrest. This is supposed to convey a warm family scene with her kicking back and inviting you, the viewer, into her home.
Now, I dare anyone in Hillaryland to tell me that she’s just doing this on her own and that her political team didn’t consciously decide to portray her in this new way to give her the humanizing, “woman’s touch” look for her presidential run. It’s so obviously contrived it’s funny.
Is it any wonder why we’re so cynical?
Update: This is exactly what I mean.
She and her advisers need a living room scene in order to “humanize” her. What more proof do we need that people don’t think she’s sincere?
Who Cares About the State of the Union?
Well, bloggers seem to at the moment.
For the most part, NPB isn’t much of a SOTU fan. I’ll watch it — with alcohol — read a little analysis here and there and then forget it tomorrow. I’m much more interested in stuff like this. That, at least, tells me something about the state of our union besides “strong.”
The truth is, I actually wanted to comment about the SOTU on a few SoapBlox blogs I was reading this morning. And I couldn’t, because the only account I have is on Daily Kos. And it’s not worth filling out the form, checking my e-mail and verifying the registration, all for a comment.
I totally understand why blogs need account registration — to fight the war on trolls and spammers. But can somebody please come up with a system where my Daily Kos login works on MyDD or RedState (need to tweak you wingers every now and then)? Blogger, Typepad and WordPress all have separate regimes, too. Why not create a portable comment ID that works across all systems?
I think a lot of political folks would participate more in the discussion if we didn’t have to sign up for an account on every damn site* we read.
Programmers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, get to work!
*I have 80 some blogs in my RSS reader.