That explains why Gruber’s response seemed perhaps overly-defensive at DF this week. To allow comments or to not allow comments is one of the oldest in the blogosphere, one going all the way back to the first half of the last decade, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the issue raised in any kind of prominent way. Certainly I have not seen it since the rise of social media in the second half of the last decade, prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.

Quoting at some length, here’s Gruber reply:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

The “it’s not a blog without comments” argument is one that was once frequently lobbed at righty bloggers, such as Instapundit’s one man band, Glenn Reynolds, from lefty bloggers on community, or “diary” sites such as Daily Kos and MyDD. In January 2006, when I was writing The Blogometer for The Hotline at National Journal, I offered some unsolicited commentary on the subject:

This certainly isn’t the case for all or perhaps even most right-leaning blogs, but there’s more than a strain of truth to this. Liberal blogs are on the whole more likely to enable comment boards than conservative blogs. … Liberal blog readers expect that a blogger make space available on their site to facilitate discussion, whereas conservative argue that anyone can start a blog and it’s not the responsibility of the blogger to give others a soapbox. It’s their soapbox, of course. The difference here is one of conservatives touting the virtue of ownership and individual initiative vs. liberals expressing a desire for community.

As lefty blog analyst Chris Bowers has observed, that there are more conservative blogs in the upper tiers, although the liberal blogs have in that range attract more overall traffic. Though there are doubtless multiple factors, one reason is because many liberals have gravitated toward these community sites. All those diaries on Daily Kos are people who otherwise might have signed up for a Blogger account and struck out on their own in the blogosphere.

So the online left and the online right tend to have slightly different ideas about what a blog is for, and on this point they’re talking past each other.

This is a little ironic, considering that Gruber’s political politics (as opposed to tech politics) are clearly left-liberal, as anyone who reads his site with some regularity has surely noticed. (Though he is surely an “Appublican” in the phrase of one clever comment, speaking of irony, here.) (And did I mention that The Blogometer was recently retired? For another discussion.)

Interestingly, Wilcox has now rescinded his previous challenge, and taken up Gruber’s not-actually-implied one, as he wrote (on his own blog, of course) in response afterward:

I argued that comments add to the narrative. Fine, I’ll try it John’s way. Most Oddly Together comments are missing anyway, following a blog transition that broke the links … As an experiment, as of today, I’ve removed the Disqus commenting system from this blog for two weeks. If I decide to permanently turn off comments, I’ll write a mea culpa post and apology to John Gruber.

So the game is afoot, though I think Wilcox will prefer his own blogging style, and Gruber will probably give at most five words to it.

Meanwhile, fellow thinking Apple supporter MG Siegler has weighed in to say his views on comments have changed over the years, and he no longer has them on his personal site:

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse.

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

It may seem like everyone has a blog, but that isn’t truly the case. What is one to do? CK Sample III concludes in a post on his own blog:

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter.

I think that’s the right conclusion. Blog P.I. does have comments, but the only reason it still does at this late date is because I haven’t taken the time to close them (you may note that I haven’t taken the time to do much writing at Blog P.I. lately, either). When this site launched in 2006 and through the next couple years as I wrote alongside a couple of talented co-bloggers, this site did begin to develop a small commenting community (including Jim Treacher, now of Daily Caller fame).

But then two things happened: The first has to do with social networking: In late 2006 I joined Facebook and early 2007 I joined Twitter, and most everyone who writes about technology and politics did so about the same time or not long after. With only anecdotal and in absolutely no way empirical basis for the claim, I would say this happened to many other bloggers, those writing about technology and politics and those writing about other subjects. In fact, a general decline in blogging has been the subject of some discussion in recent years. I can’t say that I have seen that, but I also can’t say that claim is based in empiricism, either.

A second effect is probably much more specific to this site: in 2007 I started writing about comment spam, political comment spam, Twitter spam and even political Twitter spam. Guess what happens when you start writing about spam? That’s right: you become a target of spam. I had to rachet the controls on my spam filters up so high it began to block legitimate commenters, Treacher included.

Will I turn off comments here? Not unless I return to blogging here on a more regular-type basis, and I don’t have any immediate plans to do that. Let’s say I do pick up the pace at Blog P.I., how would I like to incorporate feedback? The answer, I think, is some combination of integration with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Open Graph (and before it Facebook Connect) is the most attractive option, provided I can find someone to plug it in at a reasonable price. In this way, people can comment on this site while friends of that individual may see the fact of their comment here back on Facebook. Twitter does not yet support such a service, but they’re working on one, and as Twitter tends to be more germane to political communications (at least among those I follow) I definitely want relevant tweets here.

John Gruber may not want that, and that’s fine. His soapbox is indeed far bigger than mine, so he needs to think about managing his online presence whereas I would still be trying to promote mine (if I was actually doing that). There are probably many today who would still insist he is not writing a blog. That’s a matter of perspective, which says more about the wide range of opinion about what blogging is good for and supposed to be about. Some might even say that my own dearth of posts in 2010 has rendered it “not a weblog.” To which I would probably say: OK, then it’s not a blog. It’s still social media, albeit a relatively primitive form. Blog P.I. was state-of-the-art in 2006 but is behind the times today. (MyBlogLog in the sidebar, anyone?) I’d like to fix that, and maybe someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about politics and technology on Facebook and Twitter.

To begin, here’s erstwhile conservative John Cole making the former point:

Here is what I don’t understand about twitter. When blogs came out and started to rise in popularity, lots of folks in the MSM and elsewhere said “Great. Just what we need. The undigested, unedited thoughts of the rabble.” If blogs are the undigested thoughts, tweets are the orts.

Here’s Bloggingheads regular commenter B.J. Keefe, responding to new host Matt Lewis’ point — via my post here — that the Right is succeeding on Twitter:

Is this anything worth bragging about? What does it even mean, that there are more Republicans spewing out sound bites and ill-considered thoughtlets? … [G]iven the choice to “dominate” on Twitter compared to, say, the blogosphere, let alone actually getting people off their couches to go knock on doors, I know which one I’d pick.

Even as Markos Moulitsas has recently taken to Twitter, at least one Daily Kos community member decided to hoax the TCOT list about the contents of the stimulus bill — “$2 million for Shamwows” — and with some success, too. (On the other hand, this guy makes a good point.) And here is Gavin M. from Sadly, No!:

Twitter is that new thing that’s like burping the alphabet. Republicans are big on it because they have nothing to say.

He is being glib (what? impossible) but this is a trend, all right. What’s driving this attitude? We can’t ignore sour grapes — for the first time in a while, the Right is being recognized as doing something online better than the Left. It only makes sense the Left would want to minimize that, both to reassure themselves, discourage the Right and encourage skepticism among outside observers.

It’s absolutely true that, by itself, Twitter is a stunted communication tool. The brevity allows for faster communication, which also means less context and a greater likelihood of jumping to conclusions. Then again, the value of each individual tweet is infinitessimal and easily countered (the so-called “self-correcting blogosphere” in fact wasn’t, but the Twitterverse may be different).

Of course, there is a lot more to Twitter than 140 characters, thanks to its API and developer community. For those who may have not been following it closely, Twitpic lets you share pictures. Power Twitter embeds those photos (and links to YouTube) on the page. Utterli lets you post audio. Services like Bit.ly make it easy to track clicks on links you post. Both Farhad Manjoo and David Weinberger have recently explained how Twitter users have compensated for its limitations.

Twitter’s homepage famously asks “What are you doing?” but, famously as well I think, the vast majority of Twitter users ignore this question and say whatever they think needs to be said. Twitter is what you make of it.

Because the Left has seized higher ground on the wider blogosphere, the Right has turned its focus to Twitter, and Rob Neppell’s TCOT has helped them organize things like the aforementioned Tea Parties. Of course, this is why the Right went to the blogosphere eight years ago: they perceived the mainstream media as being controlled by the Left. There is obviously a pattern here, and it owes to the Right often considering itself in an oppositional role to the prevailing culture. (This is the same reason why the right-wing editorial positions of the tabloid New York Post and tabloid-y Fox News are so compelling: being oppositional is controversial and being controversial is fun.)

Interestingly, the Left turned to blogs in 2004 because they had lost an election and felt the media had turned against them, too. The difference is that the Left did not have a grievance culture already, and so had to create one. They did, and much of the credit for this has to go to Media Matters, whose founder David Brock literally wrote the book on The Republican Noise Machine.

The knock from lefty bloggers used to be (and still sometimes is) that conservative blogs didn’t have comment sections, supposedly because they couldn’t abide the awful things left-wing bloggers imagined right-wing commenters would say in such comment sections (even as conservative bloggers were making a cottage industry of cherry-picking the most outlandish comments out of Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and the like). Now with Twitter the complaint seems to be entirely the opposite: It’s all just chatter, there is no message to convey, &c. It’s one giant comment section.

But which is it? Well, it’s kind of both, right? Instapundit’s blog has long resembled a Twitter feed: short blasts of information with a link to longer commentary elsewhere, maybe a point of commentary and sometimes a photo as well. Twitter makes it possible for many more people (if not literally anyone) to be a clearinghouse of information for news and opinion, with Twitter itself nearly being a middleman like Google. The most-followed accounts on TCOT have tens of thousands of followers, and those with far fewer followers can specialize.

Why is this different from the blogosphere? It all has to do with the platform itself. In fact, it has a lot to do with the fact that Twitter is a single platform. Consider trackbacks, which were once supposed to be a way for bloggers to let other bloggers know they had linked to one of their posts. There was never a standard for trackbacks because blogs could be on Blogger, TypePad, WordPress or any other CMS or even be hand-coded, and so they never quite worked. But Twitter’s Replies tab (or as it’s been lately renamed, @USERNAME) works like a charm. Likewise, the column of recent tweets from those you follow provides a sense that others are reading what you write moments after you have said (tweeted) it.

Let me be clear: I do not mean that Twitter will grant everyone who signs up an Instapundit-like following. What I do mean is that by streamlining communication, Twitter significantly lowers the barriers to moving stories the way Glenn Reynolds does. And so few have shut down their blogs entirely; instead they are using Twitter to promote what they write in longer form there. The Twitterverse has not so much replaced the blogosphere as it has brought it closer together.

And yet Twitter’s efficacy as a communications medium is being questioned, too.

There’s a story going around lately — see TechCrunch, for example — about Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution.” If you’re not familiar with the situation, a series of anti-government protests in the Eastern European country have been widely perceived — see also CNN, for example — as being largely organized on Twitter.

Interestingly, this is probably not what really happened. The case has been made, persuasively to my mind, that Twitter’s user base in Moldova is too small to have been useful, and that so-ten-minutes-ago Facebook and decidedly unhip LiveJournal likely played a bigger role. It so happens this argument is primarily being made by blogs associated with the Left.

This is fine insofar as it seems to be a fair point about the case in question. But I suspect it may also also fuel the dismissal of Twitter on its own terms. Twitter may not have been the tech of choice this time, but that seems to be more about Moldova and less about Twitter. After all, it was already key to early news coverage of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Imagine if Twitter had been around on July 7, 2005, where mobile phones were used to convey images from the scene. Had Twitter (not to mention Twitpic and Qik and the iPhone) existed then, more images, sounds and even video would have been posted quickly, aiding police and rescue workers.

Just because it wasn’t necessarily Twitter this time does not mean that it won’t be involved next. Of course a Twitter message can be cluttered with @s and hashtags, but the tweet is not always the last word or the end of the line. It’s more medium than message.

The Left should not be so quick to scoff about Twitter. If they laugh it off and fail to develop networks and innovative uses, they will fall behind, appearing relatively disconnected and even slow. Likewise, the Right should not rest on what it has already created, as it did by not continuing to improve its blog-based infrastructure following the 2004 election. If TCOT is the extent of the Right’s innovation on Twitter, they’re toast as well.

Neither Huffington Post nor Twitter are making any money right now, but if I had to choose one, I’d definitely pick the latter.

Photograph of Moldova protest via Cornel Ciobanu/EPA.

If you haven’t read this morning’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger, “All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper”, it’s just the kind of arrogant-clueless screed by a newspaperman against the blogosphere that elicits first anger, then pity.

These opinion columns are nothing new. See David Simon’s disproportionate contempt for bloggers for an example of someone who managed to succeed after taking a buyout yet is still consumed by the subject. Such columns have long been a symptom of the industry’s steady decline, but as it slips into precipitous free fall, schadenfreude has given way to Willy Loman-esque pathos. I’ve never found Ol’ Gil from The Simpsons all that funny, in part because he was a poor replacement for Lionel Hutz, but also because it’s no fun to watch the helpless fail and flail.

Still, that does not mean the poverty of their arguments should be excused, especially because they are the squeakiest wheels in this dilapidated machine, and their erroneous conclusions may well be adopted by those watching from a short distance. So far Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and Robert Ivan at Metaprinter have ably pointed out the many flaws in his piece, but I’d like to tackle another. Here is Mulshine making an elitist argument that is not prima facie incorrect, but is nevertheless undone by its own careless construction:

In his book, “An Army of Davids,” Mr. Reynolds heralds an era in which “[m]illions of Americans who were in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff.”

No, they can’t. Millions of American can’t even pronounce “pundit,” or spell it for that matter. On the Internet and on the other form of “alternative media,” talk radio, a disliked pundit has roughly a 50-50 chance of being derided as a “pundint,” if my eyes and ears are any indication.

The type of person who can’t even keep track of the number of times the letter “N” appears in a two-syllable word is not the type of person who is going to offer great insight into complex issues.

All right, well this question about usage of “pundit” vs. “pundint” is easily testable. Let’s go to Google BlogSearch:

• For a search on the single word pundit we find 705,874 results. Sorted for relevance, here are the top three results as of Sunday afternooon:
1. Daily Kos: Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
2. Gateway Pundit: Israeli Gaza Strikes Called ‘Holocaust’ By Hamas …
3. Daily Pundit » Sweets for the Sour

Already we can see that Mulshine should have chosen a different word to illustrate the alleged ignorance of Internet political commentators. Thanks to those like Instapundit, the word has enjoyed a strong currency in recent years, perhaps more so than any word besides “meme”.

• For a search on pundint we find 1,320 results with the top three by relevance as follows:
1. Campaign Retrospective: Goofiest “Pun-dint” Remarks
2. Dec 18, Pundint or Pundit : Common Errors in English
3. MacBigot Cached Glances » Blog Archive » It’s PUNDIT, not PUNDINT …

Remember, these are not necessarily the savviest bloggers (let alone, strictly, bloggers), just those which (the increasingly unreliable) BlogSearch coughed up first.

As someone who tries to anticipate likely objections while writing, I can’t imagine doing as Mulshine does and simply assuming that others would willingly accept one’s personal impressions as empirical evidence. A quick Internet search reveals his example as, charitably, an exaggeration.

Not only is he wrong, even if he was right it wouldn’t be the damning evidence he thinks it is. In fact, I read a newspaper column two weeks ago that replaced the common phrase “to the … manor born” with the malaprop “to the … manner born.” A mental slip-up of this sort is indeed careless. It may mean the columnist (it was Kathleen Parker) should be scrutinized more closely, but it does not mean that newspaper columnists should be dismissed out of hand.

Smart people make common errors all the time. And Mulshine certainly seems to be among them them.

Instapundit readers 7, Blog P.I. 3: Everyone in the comments (and now Glenn, too) is right about the Shakespeare quote. I didn’t realize the phrase I knew came from the title of a British sitcom, To The Manor Born, a pun on the Shakespeare line. Would it hurt or help my cause to mention I’m an English major?

This is pretty ironic given the subject of this post, and while it certainly means one should always read me with a critical eye, it actually underscores the point about focusing on these things too much. To wit, a Google search of to the manor born returns 500,000 results, while one for to the manner born returns 52,400 results. To make another gratuitous Simpsons reference: “Show’s over, Shakespeare.”

To the list of smart people who make mental slips, one might add yours truly.

P.S. I’ve actually seen Hamlet on screen or stage at least four times, and I’m a fan, but I’ll be sure to read up on this bit now.

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.

Three’s a trend, and this is Blog P.I.’s third post in a row leaning on juxtapositions; this time, the subject of two posts from late 2006 and early 2007 have converged in a way I certainly couldn’t have imagined at the time. Both were about bloggers’ attitudes toward the presidential campaign then still taking shape, and if one can make any definitive predictions in politics, it’s that you can never make definitive predictions about the future. And this is all the more true on the morning after the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.

• In October ‘06 it was The Agony and the Apostasy, about the leftward drift of two well-known (onetime) conservative bloggers, Andrew Sullivan and John Cole. Sullivan claims to believe everything today that he believed in the early 2000s, but the day-to-day effect of his blogging is pretty much the opposite. Cole has gone from a Republican supporter of the Iraq war to a sarcastic critic of all things Republican.
• Then in January 2007, Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, the Netroots and Peter Daou, a lengthy reported piece about the Internet advertising campaign directed by Daou, coinciding with the official launch of Clinton’s presidential bid. That post also explored Nevada blogger Taylor Marsh’s incensed reaction to being excluded from the original ad buy. This post also referred to MyDD as “one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left.”

So how much does a year change? Quite a bit. The 2006 post wondered about which way the two apostates would break in the 2008 race:

It seems plausible that Sullivan and Cole could support a Republican for president alongside their erstwhile compatriots, but probably not until after the primary is decided.

My answer, hedging as it was, does not seem to have stood the test of time.

• In the year and a half since, Sullivan has moved his blog from Time to The Atlantic and, in concert with his recent criticism of the Republican Party and conservative movement overall, he has become one of the most prominent supporters of Barack Obama. So much so that The Atlantic published a December cover essay by Sullivan presumptuously titled “Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters.” On the Republican side, Sullivan had preferred McCain over the runners-up, in large part based on McCain’s opposition to the Bush administration’s torture/interrogation policies. Of course, Obama holds the same opinion. Sullivan was no doubt pleased with last night’s results in North Carolina and Indiana, but one cannot escape the sense that he’ll miss the Clintons.
• Cole, meanwhile, has become an even more constant, if not more ardent, supporter of Obama’s candidacy. Like Sullivan a former 1990s conservative, he acquired no later appreciation for Hillary Clinton. And like Sullivan, he now sees her worse attributes similar to what he doesn’t like about the modern Republican party. He remains a member of the Pajamas Media advertising network which is run and largely populated by right-of-center blogs such as Instapundit and Protein Wisdom. But now he’s also been using the Democrat-oriented ActBlue website to raise money for Obama (and Obama alone) which probably makes him the only blog simultaneously affiliated with both Pajamas Media and ActBlue. As for the primary results, Cole was exultant, apparently staying up most of the night blogging the results.

Clearly, neither are rejoining the Republican camp anytime soon. More interesting, though, is what’s happened with Taylor Marsh and MyDD.

• At the time, Marsh was leaning strongly toward Edwards and was unimpressed by Clinton. But regardless of her displeasure with the Clinton campaign’s ad buy, barely two months later she had changed her mind and made the case for Clinton. Even before then, her site had started to turn anti-Obama, especially after he dissed her home state by skipping an AFSCME-sponsored presidential forum in Carson City. Since then, she has been one of the most ardent pro-Clinton bloggers and one of the most committed Democratic opponents of Obama. And only just this morning, with the primary results clear, is Marsh shifting again: recognizing that Clinton cannot win, she will oppose John McCain without making the case for Obama.
• Meantime, MyDD has undergone even bigger changes than the other three. In this case it wasn’t a change of mind, but a change of bloggers: in July of last year, the two principal authors, Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, decamped for an entirely new website: Open Left. Their new blog has now become a new leading anti-Hillary site, as MyDD once was. Meanwhile, MyDD has shifted back to reflecting the opinion of the site’s original founder, Jerome Armstrong. Armstrong stepped up his own blogging and brought in a new contributor, pro-Hillary Todd Beeton. Armstrong had previously been a consultant to Mark Warner, former governor of (and all-but-guaranteed future senator from) Virginia, but since he exited the presidential race more than a year ago, Armstrong has become an unflinching proponent of Hillary Clinton. So much so, in fact, that it has been the source of conflict between Armstrong and his former co-author Markos Moulitsas, to say nothing of the wider leftosphere. Today, Armstrong is sounding a little more apathetic than Marsh, merely affirming that the Clinton campaign has the right to continue on.

Taken as a whole, the four websites defy categorization, dissimilar in cause and effect, except in that their content has changed dramatically over time. And I am sure that whether McCain or Obama takes the oath of office next January, I don’t want to make any predictions about which candidates each site will be supporting in 2012.

The Troops Hate Bush And Want Out of Iraq.

The article, number two in all categories for the moment, turns out to be a brief jeremiad by Firedoglake contributor Blue Texan. The full title there is

The Troops Hate Bush And Want Out of Iraq. Will Glenn Reynolds And Michelle Malkin Still “Support” Them?

and it quotes from a poll-driven Los Angeles Times story, as summarized by Blue Texan:

*Nearly six out of every 10 military families disapprove of Bush’s job performance and the way he has run the war.

*Among those families with soldiers, sailors and Marines who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 60% say that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost.

*Nearly seven in 10 favor a withdrawal within the coming year or “right away.”

There are a few things wrong with this. Most importantly — and misleadingly — the LAT poll did not exclusively query members of the U.S. military. The fine print says:

Included are 631 military family members and 152 respondents who are serving or have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, or who have family members who have done so. … The margin of sampling error for all adults is plus or minus 3 percentage points; for military families, it is 4 percentage points; for military families who served in Iraq, it is 8 percentage points. For certain sub-groups, the error margin may be somewhat higher.

My emphasis, of course.

Now, I’m not trying to spin this poll around the other way and say these are good numbers for Bush; they’re not. Even if just half of military families disapprove of the president, that speaks poorly of his leadership. I am not even saying that family members think that Iraq was a good idea or would support a war that continues indefinitely. Nobody wants to keep large numbers of troops there longer than necessary.

What I am saying, however, is that the poll is far from definitive, with an MoE north of 8 percent in the critical group, and it certainly shouldn’t be mistaken for a poll of “the troops.” Even taken at face value, the results are more nuanced than Blue Texan — or even the LAT — make it sound. If you combine “bring home within the next year” and “Stay as long as it takes,” you likewise get around 70 percent. Considering the reduced violence in Iraq since the so-called surge, withdrawal upon an acceptable situation and withdrawal in a year are not mutually exclusive. That may or not be not be realistic, but it’s not unreasonable to think that may be what some meant. Not that Blue Texan was keeping an open mind about it.

Nor do I think Blue Texan read it all that closely; the FDL post actually seems more of a screed against conservative bloggers activists than Bush or even the war:

One of the most disgraceful tactics of the pro-Bush right is the way they’ve exploited the troops politically. … And they’re still doing it. Loyal Troop Bush Supporter Glenn Reynolds, who’s practically made a career linking to garbage like this, just called the TV ad promoting Freedom’s Watch — a right-wing partisan neocon slush fund — a “pro-troops” ad.

Watch the Freedom’s Watch ad for yourself; it is unequivocally a pro-troops advertisement, free of any political content. It does not mention Iraq or Afghanistan, only that some members are away from their families right now — but this is true of those merely stationed abroad in Europe or East Asia. Heck, the organization might even be a “right-wing partisan neocon slush fund” — the wording is all subjectively negative — but it doesn’t change the ad’s content.

And that subjectivity betrays the fact that in fact Blue Texan is the one politicizing the troops, and from the boggled mindset that considers a yellow ribbon on the back of a city vehicle a partisan political statement. One wonders if they believe that personally thanking a member of the armed forces for their service while the Iraq war continues is also a de facto expression of support for the Republican party. Even if not, one wonders why they would willingly cede so much ground.

But even without any poll analysis, Blue Texan loses all credibility — and the anti-war netroots reveal their arrogance — with the extreme rhetoric. Hate is a strong word. The LAT poll most certainly shows disappointment and disapproval of President Bush and the war, but at no point did this poll — or any other one that I’ve seen — ask whether they “hate” Bush or the war.

Since the Iraq war turned unpopular, anti-war bloggers have been claiming that the American public agrees whole-heartedly with them. This opinion surely led to their surprise at John Kerry’s loss in 2004. This probably also explains much of their frustration now that Democrats control Congress but can’t end the war. They might be less distressed if they didn’t think the American public was in lockstep with their thinking.

I’d really like a respectable pollster to ask the question: “Do you hate President Bush?” Pollsters usually stick to cautious wording like “right track/wrong direction” and “approve/disapprove” — which makes it possible to compare questions over time — but just once, I wish they would measure the extent of this disapproval.

Heck, the netroots themselves have paid for their own polls before. Why not ask? Probably because they know the answer would be disappoint them. They might even hate it. But it would also save them some trouble.

But even before Moulitsas’ column debuted, I think another blogger nailed the risks inherent in Markos’ accepting the assignment in the first place. That blogger was Kenton Kelly, mild-mannered Ohio accountant turned wild-mannered critic of Pajamas Media, better known as Dennis the Peasant. From his post on November 19:

I have difficulty believing Markos can pull off the very difficult task of reconciling the requirements of expressing himself as a movement partisan to two very different audiences: Netroots members and undecided voters. Each is going to have differing expectations as to what they will get out of those columns. Netroots are, I’ll wager, looking for what they’ve come to expect out of Markos; fire-breathing, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners advocacy of progressive policy positions. Understand that what I am not suggesting here is that his Netroots audience expects him to drop f-bombs and excoriate progressivism’s enemies by name as he does at DailyKOS. What they will be expecting, however, is that Markos not give an inch on issues because of any sort of tactical considerations. Expressing open contempt for triangulation and compromise on the issues is, after all, a large part of Markos’ modus operandi.

Walking that fine line between staying uncompromisingly true to Netroots’ core ideals and supporting whomever the Democrats nominate is going to be a difficult task. Unless the Republican candidate flames out immediately after receiving his party’s nomination, it is a certainty that at some point in the race the Democratic candidate is going to have to tack from left to center to gather enough votes to win. This is the precise point in time when things are going to get dangerous for a movement partisan. That’s because Markos has been quite explicit in his distain of the centrist strategies of the Democratic “establishment”. The much reviled Bob Shrum would be just the sort to swallow such a centrist shift as a matter of practical political necessity. How can Markos approve of such a shift when it comes (and it will) without drawing the ire of his supporters?

If Markos chooses to explicitly reject a centrist shift by the Democratic candidate in his Newsweek columns, how does he do so without alienating undecided (i.e., centrist) voters? At some point the decision is going to have to be made by members of the Netroots movement, and by Markos, as to whether there will ever be a time where ideological purity can coexist with the practical needs of daily politics. By this I simply mean that at some point – and I would argue that point is very close at hand – the Netroots movement will have recruited all they can recruit, and converted all they can convert, using the message and tactics they now employ. When the moment arrives where a decision between continued purity and continued growth, what will be Netroots’ response?

Now, I don’t really think Markos matters that much to undecided or moderate voters. Of the factors that will determine their ‘08 vote, Moulitsas’ pronouncements will be very far down the list, even as he’ll be in the relatively high-profile pages of Newsweek. But it will certainly be fascinating to see how individual lefty bloggers and their adherents, including the Kossacks, will react when the nominee inevitably stakes out positions problematic (even anathema) to the activist base. Brooking no compromise is a key identifying feature of the capital-N netroots; some will go along and others will protest. And Moulitsas, with his new perch, will bear the brunt of this scrutiny.

We’ve already seen a bit of this as Matt Stoller, Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher have put pressure on the so-called “Bush Dog Democrats” (i.e. Blue Dogs) — especially on Iraq — while other prominent bloggers have largely avoided the specific accusation. A year from now, this cleavage will be much more apparent.

The whole Dennis — er, Kelly — post is worth reading, and I won’t quote the whole thing here (à la the late Steve Gilliard) and so deprive him of what meager traffic Blog P.I. directs (we’re nothing if not not Glenn Reynolds), but I must address his penultimate paragraph. As he wrote,

the events of the last two years have brought into question widely held assumptions about how much political influence Netroots and Markos Moulitsas actually wield. His attempt to unseat Joe Lieberman ended in spectacular failure, with Lieberman waxing Ned Lamont by 10 percentage points in a three man race. And for all the proclamations of victory after the congressional elections of 2006, what has become very clear is that many of the newest congressional Democrats have absolutely no interest in backing a Netroots agenda. It is not hard to come to the conclusion, after watching Speakers Pelosi and Reid suffering repeated defeats trying to push an explicitly progressive agenda, that perhaps assumptions of Netroots’ influence have been, shall we say, unduly optimistic. This impression was reinforced when most of the Democratic presidential candidates chose to skip 2007’s YearlyKOS convention. [Note: He's wrong about this, especially as the candidates avoided the DLC meeting entirely, but it doesn't negate his overall point.] You could certainly draw the additional conclusion, after listening to the exasperation voiced by congressional Democrats from David Obey to Steny Hoyer, that many Democrats view Netroots as much an impediment as an ally in advancing Democratic policies. How a column in Newsweek helps Markos in convincing the political class of the Democratic Party that he can deliver the goods (and is worth the trouble he causes) is beyond me.

Although Markos is no longer slagged by conservatives as going electorally “oh-fer” (despite Lamont’s loss to Lieberman, Kos et al. did back a slate of winners in ‘06) it’s very much an open question as to whether netroots issues are succeeding among Democrats. It’s not so much an open question as to whether elected Democrats are implementing their policy vision (such as it is), hence the anti-”Bush Dog” activism.

Another outstanding question is how Moulitsas and his fellow “progressives” will keep the coalition together past — and even into — the 2008 race, regardless of the policies adopted by the eventual nominee (i.e. Clinton, who never had them, or Obama, who has not always impressed them but has seen a surge (so to speak) among Kossacks recently).

As someone who reads Daily Kos much more often than non-leftroots bloggers, I can attest that a not-insignificant number comprise those who are not necessarily traditional liberals, let alone leftists, but have joined the community based on their opposition to Bush and the Iraq war. The effort in/occupation of Iraq will obviously continue beyond Bush’s presidency, but even the war has receded as an issue — at least in the general population if not on Moulitsas’ website. No wonder, as Dennis/Kelly pointed out afterward, Moulitsas insisted in his first Newsweek column that the imperative for Democrats in 2008 is to make Bush the issue.

Without Bush to kick around anymore, Markos will have a much harder time keeping his constituency together.

Its chances for real success are iffy, and politicans’ blogs are notoriously bad. Wizbang’s Weblog Awards understandably dropped its Best Campaign Blog category this year, for want of worthwhile entrants.

But then, one could argue that Tom DeLay is no longer a politician, just another conservative activist, so perhaps he’ll be willing to take on opponents in a manner sitting officials never are. To wit, the latest post at the time of this writing bashes Jimmy Carter for his “apartheid” book, and another post applauds Michelle Malkin for slamming Kofi Annan — just like a regular old conservative blogger.

His blogroll rings true, including just about every standard big-name blog of the rightosphere save Instapundit, and even includes Mickey Kaus (incorrectly listed as “Kaus Files”), the favorite liberal of many a conservative blogger.

Blogger “carnivals” — edited round-ups of self-submitted entries — are a mainstay of the blogosphere, and DeLay is promising a “Carnival of Conservatives” every other Friday. We’ll see exactly what that means, but it certainly sounds like a commitment to being an active participant in the political blogosphere.

What’s more, the content management system appears to be either WordPress or Movable Type, and even if not, it sure looks like a site powered by one of those traditional blogging platforms. It even claims to be protected under Larry Lessig’s Creative Commons license — which is somewhat amusing; DeLay does not strike me as a typical adherent of copyleft provisions.

Best of all, liberals are allowed to comment, at least so far. Holden of First Draft, the the owner of many ponies, has the third comment in this thread. Comments by new users are moderated, and Holden was critical but polite. One assumes that profanity is a red flag [Update: Yep] — an issue liberal and conservative bloggers do not see eye-to-eye on — but if DeLay’s team continues to let dissonant views through, the site will be the better for it.

What’s more, Holden is listed as unregistered, and as yet one need not even provide an e-mail address before commenting — something many traditional blogs do not allow.

Not that the site is entirely praiseworthy. It’s not such a big issue that he’s not actually writing his posts — few politicians do — but this disclosure does not appear on the site, though some posts do go up under his name. Even a shared byline would be nice, to give some idea of who is responsible for word choice.

For example, one contributor goes by the moniker NJ Conservative. No indication whether that person is the same as this NJ Conservative. Another is billed as NH Conservative, so the odds are these are merely anonymous contributors named for their state of residence. Will nobody post under their own names?

Meanwhile, if you want to sign up for his new political action committee, GAIN (Grassroots, Action, and Information Network), you’ll have to download a MS Word DOC, provide references, pay $52 “at the time of acceptance” and e-mail it back or upload it to the site. That’s not as bad mailing it back, but it is cumbersome. And if you’re posting this to the Internet in the first place, why require references?

Additionally, Jackie Kucinich of The Hill (and yes, daughter of you-know-who) reports that GAIN is supposed to be like a conservative MoveOn.org. I’m not sure if the analogy is hers alone — the organization’s about page doesn’t make that comparison, not that you’d expect it to — but I do know that MoveOn.org doesn’t require a membership fee upfront.

These parallel institutions, activist group and community blog, currently operate under two separate ethoses, and chances are one will eventually prevail. Time will tell which one supersedes the other. DeLay being a hardened Washington power player, I’ll predict that the blog’s best days are right this moment — one vitriolic blogswarm and the comment section could become as closed as DeLay’s former political operation.

But he is also the consummate politician, willing to go on Hardball on the day he resigned, and if he can keep smiling through the blog fights that surely lay ahead, he just may have something here.

Update: Ahem. Well, it seems that the original first post has been deleted from the website, or at the very least altered. A scandal? John Amato at Crooks and Liars seems to lean in that direction. The original DeLay post was saved and has been reposted here, with the first 111 comments available here.

It doesn’t appear that DeLay wrote anything compromising in the first post, but when you read those comments, you can see why it might have come down. Warning — “language” follows:

YOUR ARE A FUCKING DISGRACE TO THE IDEAS OF GOLDWATER. CRAWL BACK INTO A HOLE YOU TURD!

And:

Tom DeLay is a pussy-ass faggot moneygrubber.

Plus:

When you’re locked up, will you smuggle blog posts out in your visitors’ rectums?

Also:

die you fucker die

An unregistered user claiming to be DeLay writes:

Fuck you all, i am the greatest assfucker ever.

A lone voice protests:

Everyone already assumes bloggers are unemployed losers… thanks for reinforcing that stereotype…

Okay. Again, call me crazy, but it sounds like the problem here was that they didn’t have their comment moderation system ready to go at launch. That’s a blunder, to be sure, but this is not a case of DeLay’s team removing an embarrassing or erroneous post of their own (although I am confused as to why the original text of that post was removed). Lefty bloggers say civility is overrated, and while there are circumstances where they have a point, this is not one of them.

Amato implies that Democratic voices are censored from the site, but as I’ve demonstrated above, that isn’t true. But it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The State of the Blogosphere continues to be strong.

though the curve representing new blog creation finally begins to flatten:

Sifry says this “may be” the result of improved spam-fighting measures: “Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.”

He also buries the lede by skipping too quickly past this newsworthy finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

As usual the report is not lacking for beautiful charts (some of which I have appropriated for this post) but a chart showing the number of active blogs is not among them. Contrary to the bold-faced boast

Currently Tracking More than 57 Million Blogs and Counting.

there are not actually some 60 million active blogs out there. The number is closer to 33 million, which still sounds impressive even if it too is probably a little inflated, and most importantly, has the virtue of being a useful number.

In the (now mysteriously unavailable) comments on the post, one of the early respondents asked that a future report show what the top blogs are actually writing about, perhaps based on the search engine’s top 50 tags. Anyone can check out the most-used Technorati tags for themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to go down the list and figure out what genres or categories define the Top 100 and count them up.

As you can imagine, that’s quite a list. So here’s the color key for the chart and a sample:

Ready for the full list of 100? After the jump:

After the list, check below for more comments. So, what’s in the Technorati Top 100?

Thoughts:

• Blogs about technology and business make up half of the top 10 blogs and nearly a third of all blogs in the list. Is there anything interesting to say about that? It’s not just that the geeks got there first, but that they’re by definition interested in technology, and blogs are, to put it mildly, kind of a big development.
• Niche blogs are big. Considering they’re almost on par with the tightly linked political blogosphere, which also has a capable external support system in none other than the MSM, some niches must be bigger than we might have thought. This category is probably the one most would disagree with; they weren’t all easy calls. Ze Frank could be considered politics, technology or entertainment (maybe in a future edition, I’ll create tags instead of categories). But he’s also a video blogger, which is unique enough to be niche. I welcome all feedback.
• Sifry’s SOTB reports have consistently shown that about 60% of tracked blogs are written in not-English. But this 60% is vastly underrepresented in the list. One possibility is that more blogs have to compete for fewer readers in the non-English blogosphere. But considering that the relationship between links and traffic is nebulous, perhaps there simply fewer cross-links between those blogs. They are spread out over many different languages after all; 33% is Japanese, but the rest is, shall we say, Balkanized. Or, overall blog readership is the same but the readership curve is relatively flat across all blogs, and the not-English blogosphere is impervious to power laws.
• Considering how much money Americans spend per year on entertainment, blogs so themed (including gossip, sports and music) appear to be slightly underrepresented in the top 100. Does this mean that those bloggers are less influential compared to tech and political bloggers? Perhaps. It could be that entertainment journalism has satisfied reader demands better than in hard news and all the niches. Or maybe their readers don’t demand quite as much?
• MySpace is a lousy blogging platform, but it does host a couple of very successful blogs — and one of them is soft core porn. Imagine how much better represented here it would be if MySpace was more like Vox.
• Of course, these are just the top 100, the very tip of the long tail. More detailed patterns would surely emerge as one moved from 100-999 and beyond. Technorati and Dave Sifry could pull those numbers together, and I like his charts showing that blogs rival the MSM once you get to just 51-100 for inbound sources. Here’s hoping it’s in the next report.

As my high school political science teacher, Mr. Marchese, used to (and for all I know, still does) say: Questions, comments, reservations?

Sometime over the weekend, Denton dismissed Douglas from the site, implemented a new layout, new typesetting, and apparently a new focus (more money, less sex). Here’s what it looked like yesterday:

And what it looks like today:

Moreover, Denton has installed as interim blogger none other than himself. Which could work — he was a tech journalist prior to being an entrepreneur, and was an early, uh, blogebrity himself (if you remember Glenn Reynolds linking favorably to Denton’s hawkish post-9/11 proclamations, pat yourself on the back).

However, here at Blog P.I. we make no bones about getting a kick out of comment sections that turn on the site’s bloggers, and the reaction to Denton’s first post is truly something to behold. Some of the better responses:

Come on. Valleywag can spill the beans on every other “change in employment,” but you try to pass this crap off when Nick Douglas leaves? What gives. You say, “letting him go” which typically means fired. You can do better than that.

Funny, the design was one of the few in the Gawker empire that I liked. Now I’m not sure which of your generic, overlapping sites I’m on. I guess I’ll just have to deal.

How many photoshop filters had to throw up before you got that logo treatment? It may be the single most ugly thing I have ever seen in my life, and I just saw the “Naked Jen” flickr set from Dave Winer.

Oh, and IBM just called from 1955, they want their Courier font back.

The new site design sucks balls. As for Nick leaving, it COULD be a breath of fresh air (I grew tired of reading The Michael Arrington and Jason Calcanis Show), but you’re already on thin ice due to the less than forthcoming nature of the announcement.

well, it was a nice ride. ass design + letting go of your most valuable asset + renewed focus on crap people care even less about = removal from my daily web surfing routine. best of luck to both of you Nicks!

Before Spiers stopped talking to me, she once offered advice about the prospect of working for Denton or Calacanis: (I’m paraphrasing here) “It’s the old lesser of two evils thing, but at least with Jason you’re gonna get someone who is completely honest and won’t stab you in the back.”

I think this post needs more context. Who is this Nick Denton person and why should we care?

And elsewhere, tech bloggers are none too pleased, either. Here’s Zooomr evangelist Thomas Hawk:

Denton refuses to spill the beans. Was Douglas fired? Did he quit? Douglas is a pretty young guy so I doubt the old “he’s taking time off to spend more time with his family,” line works. Denton should know better than to offer us a weak, “Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go.” … So you are saying he was fired? Or was he not fired? Very, very weak for a gossip blog Denton.

Ethernet inventor Richard Bennett looks at it from a different angle:

It’s probably a step closer to relevance, but still has a long way to go. … The editor was some pimply-faced teenager from Pennsylvania who had no clue about Silicon Valley life (and still doesn’t), the mix of stories is too sophomoric and Google-centric, the comment policy is bizarre, and the design was too hard to read. The new design is even worse, using a faint monospaced font, the comment policy remains the same, Denton is the temporary editor, and the story mix remains to be demonstrated.

And he’s not alone — Matthew Ingram updated a critical post to praise Denton’s later report on mega-sites Fark and Digg ditching John Battelle’s Federated Media for a new ad network run by Maxim (yes, that Maxim). It’s a new direction, for sure. Whereas Gawker, Defamer and Deadspin reign as the definitive gossip sites for NYC media, Hollywood and professional sports respectively, Valleywag wouldn’t be considered a rival to, say, frequent Douglas target Michael Arrington of the hugely popular TechCrunch. It looks like Denton wishes to compete with Arrington, rather than merely antagonize him. And Denton certainly has the connections to make that work. But Douglas’ Valleywag was something different. Denton’s Valleywag, not so much.

Meanwhile, lit fic crit Edward Champion keeps things short and sour:

Nick Douglas has apparently been shitcanned from Valleywag and all I got was this crummy T-shirt (and one of the worst blog designs I think I’ve ever seen).

As I always say about this time: Tough crowd. But that’s the blogosphere for you, and if anyone’s developed an epidermal layer strong enough to withstand this onslaught, it’s Denton. And if there’s anything serious to be said here, it’s that the blogosphere expects accountability and openness from its counterparts in cyberspace as well as its subjects/targets in meatspace. That’s one thing you would think Nick Denton would have figured out by now.

P.S. For what it’s worth (and I realize it may not be much) I was among the first to notice Blogebrity when the site launched as a preview of an alleged blog equivalent of People Magazine speculate about what it was way back when it launched in May 2005. I would also add that I was among the first to report the truth — it was an entrant in the first Contagious Media contest — although I believe I was the only political blogger to pay it any attention at all. History repeats itself.

Update: Via 10 Zen Monkeys, I learn that I didn’t read far down enough to find the actual best comments to Denton’s first post:

JasonCalacanis: Someone tell little Nicky that I have a job for him running NickDenton.net: all Denton all the time.

NickDouglas: Jason, calling me “little Nicky” is an AWESOME way to make me consider a professional relationship with you.

If there’s an Adam Sandler joke to be made here, I don’t know what it is.

Second Update: Wisely, Valleywag has dropped the use of Courier in the regular copy.

And again via 10 Zen Monkeys, the truth comes out: Douglas was indeed fired, apparently for trying to lure News Corp. (!) into suing Nick Denton. Can’t say that sounds unreasonable.

But as I added to the comments at the end of the linked post, I recall when Denton launched Defamer in early 2004, Mickey Kaus quipped:

Why not go all the way and call it Defendant!

Can’t say that doesn’t sound like Denton’s ethos caught up with him.