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Archive for the 'Netroots' Category

Practicing Politics in the Twitter Era + Using #TCOT vs. No Hashtags Whatsoever

Published by William Beutler on March 29, 2009 in Beltway media, Conservative movement, E-mail, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Netroots, Online Campaigns, Social Networking, Tech Blogosphere, Trend Tool, Twitter, Warblogging, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 6 Comments

Practicing Politics in the Twitter Era: If we are to speak of the age of online politics — and I am not certain that we should — let’s say we’ve lived through the Blog Era (2001-04), the YouTube Era (2005-08) and now we are in the Twitter Era (2008-?). This screen shot of a blog post at Media Matters (of all places) juxtaposing tweets from Newt Gingrich and Matt Cooper — proof alone that everyone in Washington is using Twitter — provides a useful snapshot of the how Twitter works alongside the blogosphere (rumors of its death still exaggerated) in moving political messages online:

Zing.

So the Right had a vibrant ’sphere in the post-9/11 Warblogging Period, which drifted after the 2004 election, as frustrated soon-to-be-ex-Pajamas Media bloggers can tell you. The Left owned the YouTube era, which happened to coincide, not coincidentally, with President Bush’s second term. Their political blog infrastructure was developed largely on the participation of bloggers and blog readers, not anyone using Twitter yet, most of the time because Twitter did not exist or see any significant usage until SXSW 2007. (You know who I can’t find on Twitter? MoveOn.)

For at least a year now, the Right again has been leading the way on an Internet-based communication platform. So far it’s to organize for Conservatism somewhat broadly as a unifying cause. Top Conservatives on Twitter is not quite a MoveOn for the Right — a whispered-of but ultimately mythical animal not unlike the “Party-in-a-laptop” idea popular with some Neoliberals — but it could have more value as a list than Gingrich’s own Drill Here, Drill now efforts and even the (also short-time) #dontgo message it spawned last August.

These new conservative projects are often built around Twitter itself. Sometimes this results in really annoying tweets, but at this point the right is doing more interesting things in this space. Twitter is smaller than Facebook, but makes up for it in volume of press hits (hopefully someone with Nexis can back this up for me) and news reports that its traffic is about to go all hockey-stick. Maybe it will go Galt as well.

Conservatives also have other, much older infrastructure whose blogging component counts a few successes but still relies on decidedly Web 1.0 websites, and so hasn’t taken as big a hit in the Great Blog Crash of 2008-09. And like companies of the dot com crash (including Google itself), the concepts and websites that clawed their way out of the rubble did not and will not bring back substantial returns in the short run.

Twitter, by its sheer simplicity, is kind of a Long Tail product in that we can (and often seem to actually do) use it in spare moments between the day, which means its audience could approach that of e-mail (especially since, you know, you need an e-mail account to join Twitter). Either could build that kind of reach, depending on who experiments more through the rest of the arbitrary era proper.

Using #TCOT vs. No Hashtags Whatsoever:

According to Internet marketing blog Hubspot, the right’s #TCOT momentum means it vastly outnumbers the hashtags left-leaning Twitter users and bloggers… er, aren’t listed as using, not here at least. Hmm. So which hashtags do the left use?

    Late intermission.

Turns out the left-verse doesn’t do hashtags at all, that I could see from checking these accounts on Sunday afternoon:

My question for the Left is whether the port side of the Twitterverse will adopt the same habit of hashtags that moves stories — and if it does, whether it will even be led by the Kos-Greenwald-Marshall-Hamsher-Klein-Stoller-Yglesias Netroots movement. And my question for the Right is whether they know any of the Top 5 Conservatives on Twitter, because I haven’t got a clue.

Benchmark note: As of today, Markos Moulitsas (2,411) has 7,288 fewer followers than John Culberson (9,699).

Update: In the comments, @myrnatheminx — whom I tweeted alongside at TransparencyCamp during a @Leslieann44-led Sunday discussion — points out there is a website collecting progressive hashtags: Tweetleft. And as she observes, organized hashtag use lies beyond “‘the usual’ accounts.”

The SoapBlox Network: Only Sleeping?

Published by William Beutler on January 9, 2009 in 50 State Strategy, Netroots, Tech Blogosphere, Website Design and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Forty-eight hours after the big meltdown, the blogs of SoapBlox are far from dead. In fact, of the sites Blog P.I. reported being offline on Wednesday morning, all are back online, archives seemingly intact.

As it turns out, the only website that seems any different is SoapBlox itself. Gone, for the moment, is the lengthy blogroll of mostly state-based liberal (and one conservative) blogs, as well as the archives. That’s too bad, because they provided some insight to the haphazard operation of Paul “pacified” Preston. One of the last posts in December featured a harried Preston threatening to shut down the blogs of any site operators more than two months behind on their bills. No word on if he followed through, and unfortunately the last year of SoapBlox is unfortunately missing from the Wayback Machine.

Instead, the most recent post is itself now twenty-four hours old — a press release from Preston not quite admitting he’d overreacted but sounding altogether more rational than midweek. Here’s an excerpt:

At this time, all services are returned to normal.

We have many wonderful people now volunteering to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Clean servers are being created, and existing sites will be migrated shortly on to these more secure servers.

Discussions are currently underway on how to best provide the SoapBlox service, continually improve it, and keep it funded in a way that keeps everything running smoothly. Soon we will be establishing a way for you to help provide whatever you are willing to keep SoapBlox–and a large chunk of the progressive blogosphere–safe, secure and constantly improving.

Please monitor SoapBlox.net for future announcements, and feel free to contact us at soapblox@gmail.com with any ideas or suggestions you might have. Everything is on the table.

I apologize with all of my heart for the events of the past two days–from the lack of proper communication, to not seeking help that so many of you are willing to give earlier.

And what of the rumors that site passwords across the network had been compromised?
Beats me. I could be wrong, or they could be pressing ahead regardless. If I hear anything more definitive, Blog P.I. will cover it.

P.S. Thanks to Owen Thomas at Valleywag/Gawker for the link. He closes his post on the subject with this:

I suspect [liberal bloggers'] built-in biases against market mechanisms played a role. SoapBlox’s customers never bothered to ask whether Preston really had the financial resources to support it. That’s far too capitalist a question for the left-wing blogosphere to have pondered.

I don’t think I would chalk this up to antipathy to capitalism. I’d say it’s more a combination of deficiency of savvy and casual clubbiness. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, how do we learn to blog? We learn to blog from what we read every day. Paul Preston is no Buffalo Bill, but it would behoove bloggers to look more closely at whom they’re trusting with the very websites that makes them bloggers.

The Day the SoapBlox Network Died

Published by William Beutler on January 7, 2009 in 50 State Strategy, Netroots, Website Design and William Beutler. 10 Comments

SoapBlox is one of the more important but less heralded platforms in the progressive blogosphere’s infrastructure. Or, it was. If you visit the main SoapBlox website today, you will see this post at the very top:

SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST

It was a good ride, but it’s over.

Thanks for all the fish.

All these hackers messing with our stuff, and we here at SoapBlox have no clue what to do. We don’t have enough knowledge, time, money, or care to fix it.

So I hope the Hackers are happy.

If you want the data from your blog, we will get it. But we are not going to try and restore anything.

Consider this the “We’re Out of Business” post.

Most of the servers have been taken off line because they were being used to hack and exploit other websites. The hackers install this crap on servers after they get in. SoapBlox’s ISP then takes the servers off line.

We do not know when they will come back online.

We do not know if they will come back online.

This is unprecedented, I think. TypePad suffered a particularly nasty DDOS attack in 2006, but it lived to tell the tale, and is none the worse for it as far as I’m aware. And normally I don’t quote blog posts in full, but from the tone of the message, I wouldn’t count on it remaining up for long.

SoapBlox, for the uninitated, is two things: community blogging software and a weblog hosting company. Right now, any blog hosted by the company is down and is not coming back, at least until the owners migrate their sites to a new content management system, such as Scoop (on which SoapBlox was based and had largely replaced) or the widely-used, open-source WordPress.

Some of the sites offline already are among the most prominent in state-level blogospheres, including Blue Hampshire, Blue Jersey, Blue Mass Group, and Left in the West. Also down is Pam’s House Blend, which has a national audience.

Blogs using SoapBlox but hosted elsewhere are, for the moment, still up. However, I’m hearing that the software has been irretrievably hacked: security can no longer be guaranteed, for anyone. If true, this means that hackers have private information — including passwords and IP addresses — from supposedly anonymous accounts on some or all of the blogs using the software.

Among the sites still up but presumably compromised are Burnt Orange Report, Square State, The Albany Project, and nationally-read netroots blogs including My Left Wing and Open Left.

What happens next? One expects that the more popular SoapBlox websites will go temporarily offline as they transition to new software. In the short term, they may change appearance dramatically (layouts are specific to blogging software) and lose their archives. Less active sites, or those run by people with fewer time and money resources, may not survive.

But what does this mean for the netroots, or the blogosphere writ large? That will be very interesting to see.

Update: Ben Smith at The Politico, himself the proprietor of a state blog, writes:

The attack is a reminder of how little redundancy there is in big portions of the rapidly-expanding Internet, and how fragile the systems that manage content can be.

I presume that most, if not all, of the text from these sites is already cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. So for contributors now scrambling to back up their essays, this may prove a useful resource. But it doesn’t save images consistently, and those files may be gone for good.

Update 2: Some of the sites listed above have returned, at least for the moment. Pam Spaulding, whose site is back temporarily, writes:

Around 10PM last night, I found out Soapblox.net, the service that hosts many of the state blogs, has been hacked. I reported it on a couple of listservs and put an email in to Soapblox.

Pam’s House Blend, RadicalRuss.net, American Liberalism, BeThink.org are some of the sites affected, but many more went down later. I didn’t go through down the whole Soapblox blogroll but it seems most of the state blogs were not affected. The hack is restricted to only one server, but once they got in, other servers were compromised. …

Well, as you can imagine, there were a lot of unhappy bloggers losing their minds; in my case 3 years of my blog is on that platform, and it wasn’t clear what data was recoverable or when I would see it.

At some point later this morning the site is up. Now I have to get my content off of here and as of this moment, I don’t have FTP access to copy it down.

So enjoy the Blend while you can in this location.

And Eric B. of Michigan Liberal writes:

So far, it appears that Michigan Liberal’s servers haven’t been effected. Who knows…

What I do know is that a post on the SoapBlox site said that they are out of business. I have no idea what specifically that means. I am keeping a very close eye on the situation.

If you come back, and the place is dark, then you’ll know that we’ve lost our server.

Clearly, the fallout from this disaster is not yet known because it is not yet even understood. On the other hand, it’s providing a major opportunity for another company to step into the breach. One possibility: Markos Moulitsas, who has spent his own money customizing the old Scoop platform, could license it to others. I wouldn’t count on it, but a lot of people are in dire need of a solution right now.

Update 3: My NMS colleague Simon Owens of Bloggasm posts an e-mail making the rounds this morning. Here’s what it says:

My sincere apologies for posting this to several lists all at once, but this is a serious issue:

We are so goddamned screwed right now.

I spoke to Paul Preston a little while ago on the phone, and SoapBlox, according to him, is dead. Hacked, not worth resuscitating, and would cost too much money to restore with his ISP. We need to stop this from happening — if it turns out to be a matter of money to at least get the dead sites back up so we can archive them until we can move them all to another platform, then I would personally and on behalf of the other bloggers who are TOTALLY SCREWED RIGHT NOW appreciate it if the folks receiving this message who are interested in the continued existence of easily-built-and-maintained state-level community blogs could commit to making this happen.

Again, only if that proves to be the issue. But several of us are in true DEFCON 1 freakout mode here, and there’s not a whole lot else we can do.

Thanks for your consideration.

Update 4: The showrunner at SoapBlox, who blogs as “pacified”, has removed the post I led with and replaced it with one titled “SoapBlox is a Phoenix?”, which reads:

I am nothing but a dramatic person. I am sorry for that.

SoapBlox needs help. From all of you. How do we salvage this. How do we keep this going?

When you create something that becomes larger than yourself.

I apologize for being so dramatic. Again, I have a knack for that.

Giving up the fight may itself have been an overreaction, but it sounds like the software still has very serious problems. No matter what happens, it won’t be an easy dig out.

Update 5: Of course, it didn’t take long — just the third comment on the SoapBlox post — for this kind of speculation to emerge:

Maybe it was not such a good idea to have so many liberal websites at one ISP. The hackers, of course, are anonymous, but I smell a Rove-like rat out there.

The first point is a very good one. The latter, more like a natural defense mechanism.

N.B. Yes, it’s a weak headline. At least I didn’t go with “Ablogalypse Now”.

Putting a CAP on Yglesias

Published by William Beutler on December 22, 2008 in Beltway media, Comment Sections, Daily Kos, Memeorandum, Netroots, Public policy, Think tanks, Tough Crowd and William Beutler. 11 Comments

It’s been awhile since there’s been a good, old fashioned “you can’t do that in the blogosphere” controversy, but this morning Memeorandum brings us one in the form of a public rebuke to nomadic Center for American Progress (CAP) blogger Matthew Yglesias by CAP interim chief executive Jennifer Palmieri. Not just that, but Palmieri commandeered Yglesias’ blog to do so. Here’s the full text:

A Special Note Re: Third Way

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

What had Yglesias written to deserve this treatment? Two days prior, this:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.

It shouldn’t take long to figure out what the reaction would be. And it took only three minutes for the first comment, by “The CAP Cleaning Staff”, to appear:

Maybe it’s just me, but this post is kind of creepy.

Around the blogosphere, reactions have been much the same. Lefty bloggers from the netroots and academia, such as Matt Stoller and Brad DeLong, rallied to his side. Markos Moulitsas, who has a few more institutional relationships than most, was somewhat muted in his response, the first line simply being:

The Center for American Progress should not make a habit of doing this.

And I concur. The post was, as Yglesias friend Julian Sanchez put it, profoundly tone deaf. It makes CAP look less like a think tank and more like a message machine (something that is true of most DC research institutions, but few let their guard slip so badly) and it will bring yet more scrutiny to Third Way [Update: About which, great comparison here].

Yet this is also exactly the way of things, as James Joyner matter-of-factly explans:

CAP employs Matt to write a blog for them and, contrary to the views of some commenters, it’s absurd to expect that they should simply let him post whatever he feels like posting. Institutions start blogs with the purpose of advancing their institutional agenda. Writing for CAP is different from writing for a general interest magazine or on one’s own space, both of which Matt did previously.

What’s more, left-leaning but independent-minded Brendan Nyhan had already imagined just this scenario, and does not believe this will be an isolated incident:

There’s no way that this sort of reaction won’t create a chilling effect on Yglesias. How could he not think twice about criticizing Third Way or other CAP partners in the future? It’s the reason we need smart bloggers like him at independent outlets like The Atlantic that won’t enforce a party line.

It’s already having an effect on his comment section. To be sure, Yglesias’ commenters have been irritatingly wry and weirdly intelligent for years, but in response to this throwaway joke post this morning…

Deep Thought

The fact that the weather has swung rapidly from unseasonably warm to incredibly cold conclusively debunks concerns about man-made climate change.

…this was the first comment:

Now we know Jennifer Palmieri’s views on the weather. Also Third Way’s official opinions.

Just remember, Matt Yglesias is no longer writing on this blog. It’s been hijacked by Palmieri, CEO of Center for American Progress. Sad, that.

This is really sad.

I don’t think I’d go that far. But it is a reminder that the blogosphere is still subject to constraints from the outside world.

Bloggingheads.tv: Apres Moi, Left Deluge

Published by William Beutler on November 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Bloggingheads.tv, Metapost, National Politics, Netroots, Online Campaigns, Web video, White House '08 and William Beutler. Closed

On Thursday afternoon, I recorded my latest guest spot on Bloggingheads with Bill Scher. I pretty strenuously object to the argument he puts forth — that America necessarily voted for a progressive approach to government last Tuesday — I certainly didn’t persuade him, but will I persuade you? I guess you’ll just have to watch and see:

Twitter Rapprochement: Personal Democracy Forum vs. Netroots Nation

Published by William Beutler on July 22, 2008 in #pdf2008, Blogs vs. MSM, Charts and Graphs, Democrats, Earned Media, Internet conferences, Netroots, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Trend Tool, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

While we’re running Twitter mentions of political blog conferences through Flaptor’s Twist, here’s Netroots Nation (#nn08) this weekend with Personal Democracy Forum (#pdf2008) two fortnights ago:

Twitter hashtags #pdf2008 and #nn08 via Twist by Flaptor.

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.

Twitter Fight: Netroots Nation vs. Right Online

Published by William Beutler on July 21, 2008 in Internet conferences, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Metapost, Netroots, Social Networking, Trend Tool, Twitter and Web 2.0. 4 Comments

This past weekend, Austin hosted two conferences devoted to political blogging: the widely covered and heavily-attended liberal Netroots Nation (née Yearly Kos) and the brand new and under-the-radar conservative Right Online (at which I spoke on Friday).

Both conferences designated hashtags for attendees to use when tweeting their experiences and expoundances. For the Twitter illiterate, a hashtag is a short code word following a pound sign — #hashtag, for example — included in the 140-character message for the purposes of associating that particular tweet with a subject others are using the same hashtag to write about. For the conferences just concluded, the hashtags were #nn08 and #rton08.

Like we always do about this time, here’s a chart comparing their use over the past weekend. This time, we’re using Twist by Flaptor:

Twitter hashtags #nn08 and #rton08 via Twist by Flaptor.

According to the historically-fortunate assigned colors, of course. Also, it’s worth knowing that Netroots Nation ran July 17 to 20, while Right Online was only July 18 to 19. Taking that into consideration, the difference in activity is not especially surprising, considering this was Netroots Nation’s fourth year while being the first Right Online to date.

But the trend lines are still interesting, and I think we can tease out a few observations:

  • Friday late night through Saturday morning was the second-highest period of activity for #nn08 and the lowest for #rton08, at a total number of zero. Perchance the left went out partying while the right went to bed? This can’t be right. In fact, I know it’s not — for example, here’s E.M. Zanotti directing Friday night’s right-of-center bar traffic.
  • A similar thing happens 24 hours later, on Sunday morning, giving the impression that the entire Twittering contingent of each conference slept in with a hangover. While I am sure this was true for many, it’s flatly impossible that nobody tweeted during the late evening and early morning hours. So, I’ve sent an e-mail to the folks at Flaptor, and if I hear anything back, I’ll let you know.
  • Right Online activity is also likely underreported due to some confusion over which hashtag to use, although this probably doesn’t affect the overall trends greatly. Also worth mentioning, Twist doesn’t allow searching for symbols, so my real search terms were “nn08″ and “rton08″ — meaning even if some forgot the hash mark, as most assuredly happened, they’re included here.
  • It’s also possibly notable that #nn08 activity fell off severely on the last day. Is this evidence that four days is just too long for any convention? Or is it lower because people were busy leaving? I’m guessing it’s some of both. [Update: From the comments, it turns out the fourth day agenda included few events, compared to dozens on other days.]
  • Considering the reported attendance of each, the numbers don’t look so bad for #rton08. Local media reports put Netroots Nation at approximately 2,000, which apparently does not include reporters. Meanwhile, I’ve heard 500 showed up for Right Online, and based on the crowds I saw on Friday afternoon, this is plausible. However, with the exception of that curious Fri.-Sat. reporting period, #nn08 at most only quadrupled #rton08. At other times, it only doubled. Not quite a rallying cheer for Right Online, but that may be one to grow on.

See anything else worth mentioning? Feel free to add them in the comments.

P.S. FWIW, I believe I’m the first, as far as Google is aware, to use the word “expoundances.” Or should it be -ences? Again, your commentary is welcome.

Beware the “Net-roots”

Published by William Beutler on July 21, 2008 in Barack Obama, MSM, Netroots, Newspaper Columnists and Rhetoric. 1 Comment

Two previous topics at Blog P.I. have been newspaper journalists’ tendency to hold the word “netroots” at arms length, and the extent to which Robert Novak, so old he built the school, “gets” the Internet.

Novak’s column in this morning’s Post, about Barack Obama’s current overseas travel, affords us the chance to put them together. Here he is on Obama’s recent shift centerward:

Since clinching the nomination, Obama has been cautiously executing a Nixonian post-primary pivot toward the center. He weathered the outrage of his “net-roots” bloggers over his vote for the national security wiretapping bill.

Really, “net-roots”? This is even worse than the Washington Post’s habit of hyphenating the term; when I last mentioned this in March 2007, the term didn’t warrant scare quotes. And I’m pretty sure the punctuation is Novak’s, as I think I’ve been told the Post doesn’t hold opinion writers to the stylebook it applies to the news pages.

On the other hand, if you’re part of the netroots, you have to be at least somewhat pleased that Robert Novak recognizes your political clout — to say nothing of your existence.

N.B. Elsewhere in today’s paper, Jose Antonio Vargas’ report from Netroots Nation refers to them simply as “Netroots,” and that of course is sans quotation marks. As long as “Internet” continues to require capitalization, I’m fine with this formulation.

Open Left and MyDD, One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on July 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Hillary Clinton, Netroots, Site Traffic, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

This week marks the one-year anniversary for Open Left, a spinoff of the original netroots blog, MyDD. As far as I can tell, the date was not observed on the site itself, but then Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller and the rest are busy running a political website. Blog P.I. though is pretty much just about political websites, so I thought it would be interesting to compare Open Left with MyDD, and see how the two sites have fared in the year since they went in different directions. Via Compete:

Open Left and MyDD site traffic comparison via Compete.com

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:

Firedoglake, bigger than MyDD and Open Left, via Compete.com

When Even Daily Kos Supports an Individual Right to Bear Arms…

Published by William Beutler on June 26, 2008 in Daily Kos, Debates, Democrats, Gun politics, Netroots, Supreme Court and William Beutler. 3 Comments

If it’s true that today’s District v. Heller ruling is the first time in U.S. history that the Supreme Court has has directly ruled on the meaning of the Second Amendment, it also seems likely to be the last. The battle has carried on for decades in lower courts, but those cases too are likely to be cut short, if not cut off altogether.

But what about the cultural debate? I noted in a recent post over at The Next Right that the left has largely acquiesced to gun rights. They may do so grudgingly, but for all intents and purposes they’ve given up. Except… that’s not what I found on some of the most influential leftroots blogs.

Instead, I found significant agreement with the ruling. Not just that, but matter-of-fact statements of support for an individual right that would have been unthinkable even five years ago.

At Crooks and Liars, the first commenter just asked:

Is this good or bad?

The question alone is kind of surprising. And the answers came quickly:

This, my friend, is good. This is an area where we lefties have dropped the ball in a most spectacular fashion. Gun bans such as the DC only affect those actually willing to obey the law. That’s not a tagline, that’s a fact. We need to crack down on the illegal gun trade, NOT on law abiding citizens.

And some I didn’t expect at all:

Wow. John Paul Stevens could not be more off base.

Here’s another:

yay for pro second amendment democrats

And I didn’t have to look hard. These are all in the first 9 comments. Still, these are comments. How about a genuine top tier blogger? Here’s Kevin Drum:

I’m basically OK with this. My personal, layman’s view has always been that both the history and the wording of the Second Amendment point toward a limited, personal right to bear arms, not merely the right for a militia to be armed. On a practical level I’m less sure whether this is a good thing, since I’ve never gotten into the policy weeds of handgun control and whether it’s effective. Still: a right’s a right. The wording of the Second Amendment suggests to me that the government can regulate guns a bit more than they can regulate, say, speech, but that they can’t flatly ban them.

This is not to say that support was universal, but even the dissenters realized that gun control is all but dead. And at Daily Kos, Adam Bonin had advice for those inclined to be upset:

I encourage you to read this fully before rendering your opinions, because, well, it’s a Constitution we’re expounding here, and this comes up in other contexts as well. Sometimes in life (and in law), there are things that we might desire from a policy standpoint — like certain forms of gun control, or restrictions on some election-related speech — which are nevertheless forbidden by the Constitution.

And in the comments, some indeed were. For instance, here is the first comment:

Tragic day for America

DC has a tremendously bad gun problem and they can’t take these extremely resonable step of banning the gun most frequently used in crimes? It’s outrageous and despicable.

This comment was rated up 16 times. But what’s really great about this is the reply:

Disagree

The D.C. law was sweeping in banning the possession of handguns, period. If it were less sweeping, say, you can’t conceal the weapon, or you have to have a background check, or you have to wait several weeks or months to receive your gun, blah blah blah, I do not believe that would have been struck down. But the right to own a gun, stop, should not be infringed upon.

How did this one fare among the Kossacks? This one was rated up 57 times.

As Drum hints, there will be state-level debates about concealed carry, gun shows and specific makes, ammunition, etc. But now that a) Heller v. District has affirmed the individual right to own a firearm and b) influential liberal commentators and communities agree, the cultural battle over gun rights is effectively over.

P.S. For what it’s worth, Lawyers, Guns and Money is essentially neutral.