Why do I bring all this up? Because New Media Strategies (where I work and whence I type) has teamed up with Tropicana (the orange juice makers, not the casino resort) to create a Twitter-focused data visualization tool that we’re calling Fresh Squeezed Election Tweets, and just went live a few moments ago at www.anorangeamerica.com:

The site is continuously collecting tweets using the words “Obama” and “McCain”, counting up which other words appear with them — Vote, Election, Country — and other words that appear frequently — Bush, War, Lie (no one said Twitter was fair and balanced) — and representing this frequency by the size of the associated blue-red bubble. The bluer it is, the closer-aligned the keyword is with Obama; the more red, the more it’s McCain. And see the black lines connecting? Those show you which words are used together most: if you mouseover the keywords, you’ll get actual percentages. Did I mention it’s embeddable? I don’t think I did. Here, let me: It’s embeddable.

Is that cool, or what? Feel free to use it in your own posts and check back throughout the day, as the data set changes and perhaps reveals some insight into the day’s events. We might already have a pretty good idea who will be president-elect by day’s end, but Freshly Squeezed Election Tweets may help give a better idea why.

I say “typically” because Yglesias’ blogging history has taken a few turns more than most bloggers of comparable influence and readership. I wrote about this early on at Blog P.I., when Yglesias gave up simultaneous blogging duties to focus on just one and write a book, the recently published “Heads in the Sand”. I praised the move, but when he changed sites once more just a few months later, I wasn’t inclined to devote another post to it.

Yglesias is of course far from the only blogger to have changed blogs more than once at this point in blog history. I’ve done it myself a few times. At the top levels, Instapundit and Atrios both eventually migrated away from Blogspot [though as a commenter notes, Duncan still uses Blogger], and Reynolds recently moved his site again to Pajamas Media. But that’s nothing compared to Yglesias, a veritable rolling stone even if he is far from a complete unknown.

In order to give a fuller picture of what I’m talking about, I’ve created a handy chart in Keynote that shows at which URLs he has written his blog(s) and when:

This is the small version, of course. Click on the image to visit my Flickr account and see it full-size. For specific dates and the explanation for that short, unlabeled “50% red” rectangle, let’s go below the fold. Otherwise, check back after another four or five Yglesias blogs, when I’ll probably have another update.

The Full Matthew Yglesias Timeline

• January 10, 2002
  Launches yglesias.blogspot.com from Cambridge, MA.
• July 15, 2002
  Ends yglesias.blogspot.com on account of technical difficulties.
  Launches matthewyglesias.com.
• June 2003
  Graduates Harvard, moves to the District, becomes fellow at The American Prospect. Yglesias may in fact begin writing for the magazine’s Tapped blog at this time, but the blog would not have bylines for several more months. Because I’m not sure when he started blogging, I made this section of the bar 50% white, which is to say pink. [Update: Yglesias writes at his blog that he was, in fact, blogging without a byline during these months.]
• October 02, 2003
  Tapped bylines begin, and Yglesias is already contributing to prospect.org/weblog.
• June 28, 2004
  Ends matthewyglesias.com on account of technical difficulties.
  Launches yglesias.typepad.com.
• May 31, 2005
  Launches new blog on Josh Marshall’s TPM Cafe, specifically at http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com.
• August 30, 2006
  Closes his Typepad blog, ceases writing for TPM Cafe and hangs it up at The Prospect. Relaunches matthewyglesias.com.
• April 23, 2007
  Shutters matthewyglesias.com to join The Atlantic, blogging at http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com.
• August 10, 2008
  Following the announcement on July 15, Yglesias starts blogging at http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org.

Even at one day fewer (two if you don’t count #nn08’s low-key Sunday) the bipartisan-ish Personal Democracy Forum generated remarkably more Twitter noise than Netroots Nation, and apparently not much less in the rest of Internet news.

Netroots Nation had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivering a speech on the main stage, certain to be covered by political reporters on the beat, but PdF had Arianna Huffington, arguably more Internet-famous than anyone in congressional leadership. The partisan nature of Netroots Nation probably attracted many from the substantial New-Old-New Left netroots movement, more than Personal Democracy Forum’s awkward mix of Obama-emboldened NYC progressives and McCain-indifferent DC conservatives. This despite the minor Twitter scuffle over Huffington’s imperious remarks.

It’s worth noting that NN’s location — Austin, Texas — is the same as SXSW (#sxsw) and its Interactive Festival, the locus of Twitter’s first widespread adoption in March 2007. On the other hand, PdF took place in midtown Manhattan, which by virtue of population and proximity surely has more Twitterinos (also, Tweeps) close by enough to at least tweet about not making it up/down.

But I think the best explanation for PdF’s modest Twitter supremacy is that, like SXSW and unlike NN, the audience it attracts is younger and more reliably tech-oriented. After all, the surveys show that liberal blog readers are older and primarily motivated by politics than the average Valley startup founder. One was first about tech, the other politics.

Meanwhile, the ever more ubiquitous micro-blogging service’s strong showing at the political conference probably bodes well for its long-term mass acceptance.

Assuming Twitter isn’t down, of course.

…Ed Morrissey of the conservative blog Captain’s Quarters…

This prompted Morrissey to joke:

I’ll have to get John to update his Rolodex.

On Saturday, a Los Angeles Times op-ed by George Washington University proefessors John Sides and Eric Lawrence began:

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.

If you see where I’m going with this, you are probably someone who is a constant reader of conservative blogs. If you don’t, then you probably are not.

Here’s where I’m going: Twice in two days somebody with access to the mainstream media, from just outside but interested in and conversant with the blogosphere, has failed to recognize that Morrissey shuttered his Captain’s Quarters blog almost five months ago, and has been writing for Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air ever since.

It’s almost the inverse what I’ve said about how MyDD didn’t miss a beat when its top two writers decamped for a new website: as long as it continues to fulfill its mission, many casual readers will barely notice, and will be unlikely to remove it from their bookmarks. In this case it seems that casual observers of the blogosphere are so familiar with Captain’s Quarters that they assume it must be going strong, and it will be ever thus.

In a sense, the blog appears to be influential even when unread. More accurately, Captain’s Quarters simply has strong brand equity. Morrissey’s considered, even verbose explications of the latest political developments from a realistic (though not a “realist”) conservative viewpoint maintains a presence in the mind of even very occasional readers, even if the blog itself is no longer maintained, or present.

That’s not to say his impact has diminished: in fact it may be greater than ever. And so this presents a good opportunity to run another site traffic comparison, counting unique visitors, via Compete:

When Morrissey pulled up stakes, he took his entire readership with him. They didn’t have much of a choice, as typing in the old captainsquartersblog.com URL will swiftly deposit you at hotair.com without displaying so much as a redirect page first. In fact, initially it seems Hot Air grew by an even greater number of visitors than were lost at CQ, even counting the growth in traffic Morrissey experienced in his last month blogging solo. This rapid growth has leveled off and even dipped slightly, but it’s clear now that Hot Air is twice as big as it was before. The move appears to have paid off exactly as they hoped.

I confess that back in February I was personally skeptical of Morrissey’s decision, based primarily on the fact that he was giving up such a strong brand to go join a stable of bloggers under someone else’s shingle. I’m glad now that I didn’t write about it then. But even if Hot Air had received only a modest bump in traffic, the joining of forces would probably have still been a good idea, at least for Morrissey.

Now, if the worst that can be said is that some small number of readers are still thumbing through his archives, perhaps under the impression that he is still updating posts as “Captain Ed,” then that’s fine. It even helps us spot the ones who aren’t really paying attention.

Here’s how I’m reading this: Open Left had a strong first two months, rising quickly to match the long-running MyDD in overall traffic. Yet MyDD’s traffic was only slightly affected, if at all. How could this be? Naturally, site traffic isn’t a zero sum game, and it’s probable that a reader of one is a reader of both. But it took Open Left a bit of time to pick up readers, while I’ve long been of the belief that as long as MyDD adequately covers its subject matter, Democratic campaign and Hill staffers will never remove it from their bookmarks.

Then MyDD achieved some separation in the fall, which initially I’d attribute to growing interest in the presidential contest. One of the main reasons Bowers and Stoller left was to focus on the progressive movement writ large, rather than the horse race — so it is understandable that it would not be the go-to site in the heat of the primaries. And then starting in December, MyDD really began to take off. While some of this is probably attributable to still more interest in the nominating contest, I’d wager the sharp spike owes to site founder Jerome Armstrong (along with Bowers/Stoller replacement Todd Beeton) taking the site in a strong pro-Clinton direction. This distinguished it from most lefty blogs, which ranged from avidly pro-Obama to mildly pro-Obama (as I’ve discussed before, Open Left was at best tepidly pro-Obama).

Odd, then, that interest peaked in late January/early February, as the nominating contest was only just getting under way. Open Left suffered a drop in traffic around this time as well, suggesting a broader trend. Traffic slowing just when things got interesting? Maybe it is more interesting to the outside observer, where the same thing is frustrating to partisans who expected to have a nominee. And then as Obama inched closer to the nomination, the interest of Clinton supporters remained flat, while the leftosphere overall turned to matters of organization rather than elections. This part, I concede, is the most speculative; I admit to being a little baffled by this section of the chart.

And now? Well, the last month shows another slip in traffic for both, with MyDD staying slightly ahead. I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued for another month. August is slow in politics, even in election years, and even in the blogosphere.

But it seems clear that despite being an expansion team, Open Left is in the same league as MyDD. Then again, it seems no matter how big you get, there’s always someone bigger than you:

One aspect I haven’t seen discussed in any great detail is the second page of the website, “Behind the Smears”. It’s not easily found — although it occupies the somewhat prominent last spot in the list of links at left, it’s also buried at the bottom of the page, below the main content and just above the site disclaimers.

The main content of said page is a chart showing the relationships between the accusers, and it looks like this:

It’s pretty neat, but it’s also under-designed. After all, it seems to claim that the 1992 Clinton campaign itself is is smearing him, when all it means is that… actually, I’m not sure what it’s saying. What’s more, the lines are too light and don’t convey any specific information about how they are connected. There are a few small revisions which would make it more intuitive: a dotted line for lesser connections, or bigger names for those with more influence.

Relationship mapping is becoming a bigger deal in the blogosphere as more rigorous and even scholarly studies are done about the connections between blogs and attempts are made to quantify the influence one has upon another. This is driven in part by curiosity and in part by my own industry, where marketers are desperate to accurately quantify their impact. One example comes from Linkfluence, as demoed at Personal Democracy Forum this year:

But how useful is this information? It’s nice to see a representation of the political ’sphere at the macro level. Some insights can certainly be derived therefrom, but it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, it doesn’t necessarily help me to know that one site has linked to another. I need to know why. I need to be able to drill down, and find out how they are arranged by a common link or keyword.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for pretty pictures.

And while the Obama campaign chart isn’t all that pretty and ultimately not that informative, it’s nevertheless a step in the right direction. The more and better tools a campaign can give to its online supporters, the more investment (in time as well as money) they are likely to make in turn.

In any case, it was a freewheeling discussion of digital politics, broadly defined. With a keyboard and projection screen at our disposal, we rambled from David’s YouTube projects for Rep. Jack Kingston to the website of my employer (and this site’s host) New Media Strategies. At one point, the question arose of Matt Drudge’s influence in the past compared to RealClearPolitics. We didn’t know the answer, so I went to Alexa (an imperfect tool, but more accurate the more traffic a site gets) to get an idea:

Wow. Now that’s a mighty steep fall for a website that once almost brought down a president, yadda yadda yadda. Now, I’m sure his influence remains greater than his traffic; after all, Washington journalists are still reading his website out of sheer inertia. As recently as September 2006, “Gang of 500″ coiner Mark Halperin said “Drudge rules our world,” which pretty much sums it up. Meanwhile, RCP has had a strong 2008, even if their traffic only spikes around the elections (David noted the first, biggest spike was election night 2004 when the site was a destination for leaked exit polls).

Back in the office this afternoon, I decided to look up another site often compared to Drudge, especially at the outset in early 2005. This one surprised me even more:

Surprising? Yes, at least if you remember how ubiquitious the Drudge Report once was. But let’s take a few things into consideration: for one, there is much, much more content on Huffington Post. The above chart is measured in page views, and every time someone clicks from the front page of HuffPo to Eat the Press or Nora Ephron’s latest Dear Jane letter to Hillary Clinton, that counts as another. Drudge meanwhile has just one page, and if my clicking habits are representative of others’, the tendency is to click on a story, hit the Back button, click again, go Back, etc. On many browsers, each subsequent view may draw upon the local cache and not register another hit for Drudge. Then again, he’s enabled that insidious technique known as auto-refresh, so if you accidentally leave his page open for any length of time, it will reload however often

var timer = setInterval(”autoRefresh()”, 1000 * 60 * 3);
function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);}

is. Another thing to consider: Huffington’s numbers are nowhere near Drudge’s at the peak, and it’s highly unlikely she ever will — unless maybe she manages to bring down another President Clinton. (And I wouldn’t count on it.) Like M*A*S*H vs. American Idol or Star Wars Kid vs. Leave Britney Alone, there is too much competition for eyeballs, with the advent of cable television and YouTube respectively, for new programming to outperform the old.

And, clicking around a bit more, I realize I am not the first to note Arianna’s upset: Kara Swisher at All Things Digital first noted it about two weeks ago. But you know how it is. Too much demand on our attention to see everything we’d like.

P.S. Come on, Alexa. Why can’t I embed more than one of your charts on a page? The screen caps look terrible when I shrink them them to fit the column width.

Online fundraising startups are a longstanding interest of Blog P.I. In our year and a half, we’ve devoted more than a few posts to the subject, including the progressive, Democrat-supporting ActBlue, the conservative, Republican-aligned newcomer ABC PAC/Rightroots, attendant security issues and flawed coverage often (but not exclusively) in the Washington Post. The last time I wrote about it, Rightroots had relaunched, and two similar Republican fundraising startups — Big Red Tent and Slatecard — were announced and on the way shortly.

Now, all three have been up for more than a month, which I think is enough time to make an early comparative assessment.

For those playing at home: Rightroots is a reboot of the ABC PAC/Rightroots slate that saw a trial run fairly late in the 2006 cycle, controlled by McCain adviser Becki Donatelli, former Giuliani Patrick Ruffini and Mike Turk, an outside adviser to the Thompson campaign. Big Red Tent is an outside-the-beltway venture by a pair of Austin, Texas web consultants Ryan Gravatt and Brad Jackson. Slatecard is the brainchild primarily of ubiquitous DC Internet guy David All and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram (who strangely has no website that I can find).

Last weekend, I signed up for each one and made some nominal contributions. Since then, I’ve continued poking and prodding. I thought about putting together an elaborate chart comparing their features side-by-side. Perhaps in a future post I will, but for now, but I don’t think that gives as clear a picture of what I thought about them. Instead, this post collects my observations, with screen captures. It’s a long one, so I’ve tucked the rest of this post below the fold. Follow me…

I should preface all of this with a caveat: These observations are simply what I found when I visited over the past week. It’s possible there are oversights in my summary, and if there are I will update this post. In true Mystery Shopper style, I didn’t discuss my testing process with any of those involved, so this should not be taken as a fully reported piece. There are probably good explanations for many of the problems I encountered, and if they are given, I will gladly link to them in an update.

Choosing a candidate to receive my small donations was not difficult: I am not only providing outside counsel to the Fred Thompson campaign through my employer, New Media Strategies, but I am also a FDT supporter. Thompson’s consistent federalist philosophy being a large component of my enthusiasm about his candidacy, where I could, I termed my group or slate “The Frederalist Society.”

With that out of the way, here are my thoughts on each in turn, followed by a conclusion. As always, YMMV.

RIGHTROOTS

Because Rightroots is the oldest, arguably best-known and first to go live (again) this summer, that’s where I started:

• The website is very simple, and not difficult to navigate. From the main page, one can click through to “Candidates & Races” or perform a search, enter the amount of money you want to donate and proceed to its Amazon.com-style checkout.
• Rightroots includes a link to the candidates’ homepage, which is nice, but that’s about it for any information about the candidates. One pretty much has to know who they are supporting before they get there.
• Using Rightroots, I donated $5 to Friends of Fred Thompson. This went fairly smoothly, up to the point where I had to enter a credit card. The confirmation number on the back of my card has just three digits, while the form demanded exactly four. So I put a zero in front of the digits, and that did the trick. It would have been nice if it would recognize the different security systems for each of the major cards.
• The front page of Rightroots also lists “hot slates” (groupings of candidates) but it doesn’t list figures for how much each have raised. These slates were evidently compiled by Rightroots itself, and so does not answer one of my main criticisms from last year — that it does not allow for users to compile and promote their own slates. I was told this feature would be included next time, but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen. Consequently, this was also the one site where I was unable to set up my “Frederalist Society” slate.
• Now, the selections for some of these slates make good sense — “100% No Earmarks” is described on that page as:
  

  Honoring House Republicans with a perfect 100% voting record against pork barrel earmarks in the 110th Congress, as recently scored by the Club for Growth.

  Nice. On the other hand, one slate merely collects all of the Republican presidential contenders — well, except for Alan Keyes; I doubt that bothers you. But I also doubt very many people want to donate to all of the White House candidates.

• There is a “Donate All” button for each slate, but it’s hidden at the bottom, underneath the last candidate’s picture — it is not flush with the other, similarly-designed donation buttons.
• More nitpicks — Rightroots’ poll, promoted on the front page, is out of service. Try voting, and you get this:
  

  An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

  The good news is, the error message goes on to detail instructions for fixing the error. I don’t do code, but if I could get terminal access, even I could probably take care of that. Also, there is no button to view the results without voting.

• Along the same lines, I also got this certificate warning at one point:


• But I really dig the link to the FEC query for Rightroots’ own reports. The others should follow this example.
• I gotta give Rightroots this: It is back. The website languished after the November ‘06 midterms, which I complained about in January, drawing strong objections from some of those involved. I wasn’t sure that it would actually return, but it certainly has done that.
• Unfortunately, the follow-through seems to be half-hearted. Nothing has been added to the News section since August, and it’s been just over a month since anything was added to the blog (there are 5 posts total). It’s not clear to me why there are separate sections for “News” and “Blog.” This reminds me of typical campaign websites, which have had a press release section since the dawn of online politicking, then added blogs separately when they became the norm. Why not put everything in one place?
• RightRoots is simple, but it’s too simple. The site lacks any compelling reason to use it. (Really, not even a widget?) There is nothing that makes the site sticky, or compels you to come back.

BIG RED TENT

Next, the one I know the least about:

• My relative ignorance about Big Red Tent probably has something to do with the fact that its creators are based in Austin while the others are inside the Beltway. On the Internet, physical location is of much less of a consideration, but it still hasn’t received much coverage. It does have the official backing of RedState. But I haven’t seen them write about it since it first went up.
• This site is quite a bit different than the other two, starting with the sea of white compared to the others’ dark backgrounds. I like that. I like the logo, too — it’s the best of the three, I think. Moreover, it also has the best name, communicating its intent to build one large, happy GOP family.
• Otherwise the site is a chore to navigate. Why does Big Red Tent not have a “Sign up here” button on the front page? Why can’t I click on the logo to return to the homepage? Rightroots and Slatecard offer both.
• When you go to sign up and give money, the form asks for your blog URL (sure, why not) as well as my IM screen name (hmm) and cell phone number (really?). There are not required, but it would be nice to know why they were asking. This reminds me of the website Radiohead built to sell their latest album, “In Rainbows.” Am I opting into future text messages? I know people who just elected to grab it off BitTorrent instead. I don’t think that quite works for Big Red Tent.
• The reliance on Drupal means I was assigned a convoluted password, rather than being able to choose my own. Maybe I should write down every single password for every single site where I’ve created accounts, but I don’t. So this bugs me.
• Big Red Tent is not free of bugs, either: I kept getting this when I was logged in:
  

  “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.”

  Hitting “reload” did take care of the issue, but it happened a couple more times thereafter.

• Alone among the three, Big Red Tent has a Twitter account. Great! Unfortunately, it hasn’t been updated in approaching two months:
  
  

  In that case, it’s fortunate that it isn’t featured on the main page (where it probably should be), where it would signal to all that there isn’t much activity here.

• Big Red Tent offers a widget that I didn’t test, but looks attractive enough to place in my sidebar. However, it seems to be fairly wide, and I doubt it would fit in everyone’s sidebar. (But I certainly approve of the fact that the example widget shows Thompson at the top.)
• Is Big Red Tent trying to do too much? Take for example BRT TV — a promised series of video interviews, hosted by Gravatt and Jackson’s Patriot Group colleague Jill Warren, that has no third video (really second, as the first is an introduction). Again, the lack of follow-through isn’t promising.
• More questions: Why does signup page still ask if I want to be notified when they launch? Seems to me like they’ve already launched. Why can I click into Groups at the top of the page, but not individual Slates? Isn’t “Group” just another word for category from the blog? Where is the blog? The Field Report is helpful, but I could use more of it. I also can’t find the Stump Speeches feature now, so I can’t link to it.
• Stump Speeches, Slates, Groups, Files, Contact lists, Guestbooks, Inboxes... help! I’m utterly lost. The confusing array of features reminds me of the late, unmourned HotSoup and its “issue loops.”
• At least you can create your own slate. As Gravatt explained to Matt Lewis in a Town Hall interview this summer:
  

  We were faced with a decision: Who will the PAC support? We only liked two options. Option 1 is for Brad and I to decide, and Option 2 is to let others decide. We decided Option 2 would be best for a PAC with an online community.

  That’s right on, although it doesn’t seem that there is much of a community so far. That said, at least it offers the possibility, which Rightroots does not.

• I concluded my experiment with Big Red Tent feeling both overwhelmed and underwhelmed. It’s great that there are several functions, but it seems there are several too many. Ultimately, I felt like maybe there was something going on that I just didn’t get.

SLATECARD

And the newest kid on the block:

• Slatecard had both the longest incubation period and was the last to launch. This owes something to principal David All’s penchant for self-promotion, which may bug others (including some at Rightroots) but probably serves Slatecard well.
• At Slatecard, the minimum donation is $10, unlike the others, where I was able to give just $5. Credit card processing fees do take a big bite out of proceeds, so I understand this, and there are probably very few who can afford to give no more than $9.99. On the upside, Slatecard alone lets you check a box to make your donation recurring monthly, if you’d like.
• On the downside, unlike the other websites, my phone number was required. I would kind of like to know why.
• Otherwise I had no problems signing up or making a donation. If there are bugs in the site, I didn’t encounter them. It was the smoothest experience I had at any of the three.
• On the other hand, why isn’t there a search function on the website? The other two do offer this capability.
• The front page of Slatecard shows you who’s “hot” — individual candidates and user-created slates — and includes dollar figures. That’s cool. The non-disclosure from the other sites I believe is a holdover from traditional campaigns, where if you’re not sucking up the dollars (and therefore sucking), you don’t want that public. All puts his cards on the table, and I respect that.
• Speaking of which, All has led an e-mail drive to raise $75,000 overall in the first month since going live. He didn’t quite make it, but it was very close — and within days, the $75,000 goal was met.
• Slatecard offers widgets, of course, and they are the best-designed of the bunch. In fact, if you’re on a Leopardized Mac, All has even explained how you can put one in your Dashboard. (Note: This is a Leopard feature; one could do this with Big Red Tent’s widget as well.)
• True to All’s love of all things social networking, candidate pages link to each candidate’s official pages on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and the like. Each is represented by the socnet’s logo, but you have to mouseover to know that they go anywhere. Slatecard links to candidate official sites as well, but it’s just a clip art image of a house — I got it the second time, but it would make a lot more sense if I could just see the URL as on Rightroots.
• Because Slatecard has the best pages for individual candidates, it paradoxically left me wanting even more. For one thing, the biographical summaries are clearly copied from older versions of each candidate’s Wikipedia page. I can tell because I know Wikipedia style, but it doesn’t identify the source.
• And these pages would be improved if you could add comments. Slatecard gives the impression of offering greater interactivity than the others, when in fact Big Red Tent so far allows for the most feedback.
• Perhaps the most unique aspect of the site is the ability to add “issue badges” to candidates you support. As much as I’d like to sneer, “we don’t need no stinkin’ badges,” I dig this:
  
  

  Naturally, I added the “Federalism” badge to Thompson’s page. It makes sense that you can only add a badge if you have donated to a particular candidate. However, I was only able to add one badge, and the site doesn’t say how many added the same badge as I did. It would also be nice if you could organize by badges and call up a list of all the candidates whom users think they describe. And would it be too difficult to let users create and upload their own?

• This feature also includes idiosyncracies that are all All — one of the issue badges is for “Supports Net Neutrality,” a pet issue of All’s, and something only Mike Huckabee does. As Ruffini has noted separately, it’s essentially a lefty issue. Sure, you can add the “Opposes Net Neutrality” badge… but why is “Support” represented by Pac Man and “Oppose” is represented by Blinky (the red ghost villain)? An annoying editorial tic.



• Perhaps a more serious issue — the badge for “Defeat Radical Islam” puts the Universal No symbol over the Star and Crescent. The war against radical Islam is not, the last time I checked, a war against all Muslims. But that’s what the badge implies.
• Most promisingly, the frequently updated blog announces milestones and upgrades, and has done so consistently since Slatecard launched.

All of these sites are good enough — that is, they do what they advertise. It’s just a baseline, though these websites are still in their infancies (maybe some are toddlers). After tinkering around with each, Slatecard emerges the winner in my book so far. It’s by no means perfect, but it seems more thought-out than its rivals. It offers some unique features that are still fairly intuitive, and it appears to be the most active. While there hasn’t been much activity on either Rightroots or Big Red Tent since their respective launches, I presume both parties imagined the sites would be self-perpetuating and requiring minimal upkeep. At least Rightroots doesn’t promise much more than it delivers; Big Red Tent was more ambitious but almost feels abandoned.

Most of my judgments above are fairly subjective, so I did try to include one objective (if imperfect) metric — how often each site is linked to by third-party websites. Since BlogPulse advertises this capability (unlike IceRocket) I fed the URLs for each into their Trend Tool, selected feedback for the last three months, controlled for possible alternatives (ABCPAC.com and BigRedTent.com both redirect to their respective main sites), and here’s what I found:

Rightroots has had the highest highs, Slatecard is buzzier now, but thanks to an apparent spike in attention last month, Rightroots is hanging in there. I presume that All’s frequent promotion for his project is propping up his numbers a bit. Big Red Tent was in the mix when it launched, but never received as much attention and has since dropped off significantly. (Note: I also fed the names of each site into BlogPulse; the Trend Tool returned more spikes for each, but the pattern was the same.)

Although there are many differences between the sites, they are not so far apart that, given an update or two, Rightroots or Big Red Tent couldn’t usurp Slatecard as the go-to site. But perhaps the most important thing about Slatecard is that, like ActBlue but unlike its Republican counterparts, it has already made the transition to being the primary fundraising mechanism of a political candidate. That’s VA-01 hopeful Kevin O’Neill. So far he’s raised nearly $65,000 — so All should definitely be thanking him for helping reach that $75,000 goal. Of course, candidate support is just what a site like this needs to gain credibility in Republican campaigns, and it’s no secret that brick-and-mortar GOP consultants are warier of using the web than their Democratic counterparts.

I salute each one of these websites, and their creators, for doing what they are doing. I hope they all continue to upgrade, borrow features from each other and compete for online GOP fundraising supremacy. And there’s no reason why there needs to be just one; perhaps they can all find a niche. I hope they do.

Disclosure: As previously noted, I’m with Fred, but that merely influenced the direction of my extraordinarily modest contributions. Otherwise, I do know some of those involved. I consider David All a friend, Patrick Ruffini a friendly acquaintance, and while I have not met Mike Turk in person, we do sometimes work together behind the scenes in the Thompson camp. None of them knew I was writing this post, and I doubt that any of them will be entirely happy with it.

It made sense, though. The bloggers who show up on Techmeme are much more likely to track themselves on that site than are the bloggers who populate Memeorandum likely to watch themselves. Of couse, all tech bloggers are geeks in good standing, while only some of us political types are. So they get the goodies first.

But as expected, Rivera rolled out his Memeorandum Leaderboard, and he did so this week. As he explained, the Leaderboard

identifies 100 of [the most influential political blogs], ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month. It updates every 20 minutes and offers archives of past days. … The memeorandum Leaderboard doesn’t tell the whole story of course. For instance, influential curators of opinion like Instapundit.com don’t figure highly given memeorandum’s preference for longer articles. Yet it remains a handy portal to many of the sources with the greatest role in framing and shaping the national debate.

It’s handy, all right, and it fills a need. Five years ago, in a very different political blogosphere, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem was the definitive guide to the top political blogs. But with Rob Neppell (née N.Z. Bear) now focused on other projects, it’s fallen into obsolescence. The Technorati Top 100 was a welcome addition, but its inbound link counts were sometimes unreliable, it never focused on politics per se, and as I pointed out last year, the political blogs have to share the top 100 with many other genres. Since then, Technorati has lost its direction in other ways, and it’s too soon to tell whether founding CEO Dave Sifry’s departure will change things. I’m not counting on it.

So while Rivera’s list is worth analyzing, it should come as no surprise that the analysis so far has come from more tech-centric bloggers. For example, here’s TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley marveling at how important the legacy media remains, especially compared to the ’sphere in which he moves:

According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs. … The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.

The observation is fair, but I object to the judgment call. For one thing, defining the subject matter of Memeorandum as “politics” is far too narrow. Foreign affairs, U.S. diplomacy, domestic policy, electoral politics and sundry current events make up the subject matter at Memeorandum — a much broader spectrum of news and analysis than what TechMeme covers. Moreover, these subjects often require reporting from around the country and around the world that even in the digital age aged institutions with more resources than resolve continue to dominate. Most of the stories on TechMeme emanate from the Silicon Valley; Memeorandum spans the world at large.

GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication:

Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.

Myself, I’m still thinking it over. To get started on the process, I separated all the websites on this afternoon’s Leaderboard into a few arbitrary categories and added up the percentages accorded to each. I then created a simple chart with Zoho Sheet (beating out Google Docs by a slim margin and NeoOffice by a much wider one) to visualize the statistical spread. Others will have different ways of breaking this out — and I may have different ways at a later date — but here’s what I came up with:

I should note the numbers taken off the leaderboard do not actually add up to 100%. That’s something I intend to ask Rivera about, and because the Zoho chart rounds them up to reach a sensible 100%, here are the actual numbers as I compiled them:

This dilutes MSM-owned websites only just a bit; as you can see, print and wire-based news stories commanded much, much more attention than websites based on television news, so you can squint and add that back in if you’d like. Add in MSM-created content specifically for the web, and it’s up over 60%. That is also a more arbitrary but, I would argue, more necessary category — “MSM Online” is where I placed any ostensibly non-partisan blog and any non-blog content by more partisan sources. These days established media organizations are creating more and more content for the web, and much of it differs in character from what they publish on dead trees. Liberal and Conservative blogs are more self-explanatory; the hard-to-categorize sites included Drudge Report and The Moderate Voice. The Primary Sources were Gallup, Rasmussen and whitehouse.gov. If anybody cares, I can forward the list as I compiled it. It could probably use some revision, and I certainly reserve the right to have made a clerical error here or there.

I’ll leave you that to chew over for now. I’ll be back with answers when I have them, and with any luck, I will be back inside of a month with a few more thoughts about what all is going on here.

Ahead of me already?

For most of the 20th century, the color red was associated with Communism, and for reasons that scarcely need explaining, it carried a decidedly negative association in the West: Better dead than red, after all. The American left certainly had its share of Stalinists, and anti-Communists on the right didn’t hesitate in extending the term. When I lived in Eugene, Oregon, the town daily Register-Guard was sometimes referred to as the Red Guard.

Likewise, the color blue is sometimes associated with nobility in Europe and the upper class in America, particularly in the Northeast — I refer to the term blue blood. The stereotype of rich, right-wing industrialists who cannot identify with regular Americans has probably been used against every Republican candidate since Lincoln. The recognition that this can be a political liability is what led Mike Huckabee to recently descrbe himself as “a blue-collar Republican, not a blueblood Republican.”

Meanwhile, witness the rapid adoption of the terminology. One of the rightosphere’s best-known websites is RedState; an online political firm founded by former Howard Dean staffers is called Blue State Digital.

It’s worth remembering that in elections prior to 2000, the colors were not standardized across the television networks, and they also switched colors between the parties. In 2000, chance might have had red assigned to Democrats and blue to Republicans. The prolonged attention to the electoral map might have given rise to opposite definitions for the terms, but would they have stuck?

I don’t think so. The vice versa could never have become political shorthand in this country because neither side would allow it. Reversed, the colors would draw attention to negative aspects of each party’s intellectual and sociological histories.

Therefore, the switch is serendipitous — by adopting the other side’s derogatory colors, each cancels out the other, and in the 21st century can accrue all-new (and perhaps more positive) political connotations.