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Archive for the 'Tough Crowd' Category

Everyone an Instapundit: How the Left Underestimates Twitter

I’ve noticed a trend over the past few weeks, roughly concurrent with the Twitter-reinforced Tea Party movement, which is a tendency on the Left to dismiss Twitter both for its apparent limitations as well as its embrace by the political Right. Not only do I think they are making a mistake, but the explanation in part illuminates why Twitter is becoming ever more important to online communication.

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.

twitter-t-logoIt’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.

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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.

instapundit-logoThe 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.

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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.

moldova-protestThis 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.

I Come to Bury Local Newspapers, Not to Praise Them

Friday marked the one week anniversary of the death of the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper I never read in a state I have never visited. On the other end of the media spectrum, the recently-launched The New Ledger featured a relevant rumination by Francis Cianfrocca this week, which notes:

There’s a tremendous amount of value to news collection: generating basic data, and massaging it with taste and with an informed editorial viewpoint, into information. A big part of this is cultivating sources. But a big part of it is constructing a narrative out of the data, boiling it down into bite-sized pieces.

Which reminds me of the RMN’s association with one of the most blackly comic examples of old media employees’ new media ineptitude, perhaps one of the worst media moments all of last year:

One could say the same thing for the Rocky Mountain News, if not just yet the mid-size, second-tier city newspaper as a genre. But we may get there soon enough.

Macon Phillips Has Probably Had Better Days

All of a sudden, I think I maybe know why President Obama abandoned his Twitter account.

To wit, it’s been a rough day for the Obama administration — and I’m not just referring to former Dallas mayor and U.S. trade representative-designate Ron Kirk’s tax issues — I refer also to their web team. First, an article in the Washington Post from Jose Antonio Vargas about the setbacks they’ve experienced in the transition from campaign to White House. For example:

Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out involving the collection of cellphone numbers, according to Obama aides, who acknowledge being caught off guard by the strictures of government bureaucracy.

“This is uncharted territory,” said Macon Phillips, White House director of new media, which was a midlevel position in previous administrations but has been boosted by Obama to a “special assistant to the president.”

Phillips hails from Blue State Digital, although Vargas curiously omits that detail. Instead, he gives Phillips a chance to defend himself:

“WhiteHouse.gov,” Phillips said, “is not like BarackObama.com or Change.gov. We’re not running a campaign anymore. To us here, WhiteHouse.gov is not just a Web site. The new programs that we will roll out are more than just URLs. They are new ways to engage with citizens. Stay tuned.”

Phillips called the site “an ongoing experiment.”

At least, I think that’s what he did. Vargas uses the second half of the article to survey David Almacy, who held a similar position in the Bush White House, and Obama allies. It closes out with this quote from Andrew Rasiej, known best in Washington as co-organizer of Personal Democracy Forum:

“A lot more questions need to [be] addressed: Where do you insert the public comment portion in a bill? Do you start five days before the president signs it? Or do you start the moment Congress passes it?” asked Andrew Rasiej, founder of the political-tech site Personal Democracy Forum. He served as an adviser to the Obama transition’s technology, innovation and government reform group. “As of right now, the comment section is like a black hole. Of course it’s not enough by the standards of the Internet as we know it today.”

This morning after the story went up, Rasiej was moved to respond at TechPresident (which is really the active website; since it launched, the PDF brand has been primarily associated with the annual conference), with a diplomatic tone suggesting he was concerned about coming off too negative, which can be boiled down to the following sentence:

There was one more sentence in what I said to Jose that followed, but it was left out of his piece. I added, “But they will get there.”

But that may have been the highlight of Phillips’ day, because later this afternoon CNET’s Chris Soghoian reported that the Obama campaign web team has abandoned its YouTube channel for Akamai video distribution that made the top story on Techmeme. Soghoian explains the decision was in response to complaints by privacy activists:

The White House’s decision to move away from the Google-owned video-sharing site will likely be met with praise by privacy activists and could mark the beginning of a real backlash in response to Google’s insatiable thirst for detailed data on the browsing habits of Web surfers.

I wonder if this wasn’t done more to protect the White House than viewers on the site; after all, wasn’t this essentially the problem with President Obama’s apparently successful bid to keep his BlackBerry — that the data went through someone else’s servers? That said, I can’t see a White House video intended for public consumption ever being as sensitive as the president’s e-mail messages. [Update: I was right that it didn't make sense -- National Journal says it's not true.] Meanwhile, Vargas explains some of the limitations making Phillips’ job harder:

[T]here have been limitations. For some time, the site was not permitted to link to third-party sites whose URLs did not end in .gov or .mil, according to David Almacy, Bush’s Internet director from 2005 to 2007.

Some restrictions persist. For example, to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which mandates the preservation of all White House written communication, a Web page must be archived whenever it’s modified, slowing down a typically quick process of building new pages and refreshing the site.

Being president is hard work. Complying with the many, many regulations surrounding White House communications is harder. Some of them are good ideas meant to ensure transparency, but others are surely outdated like the third-party site link ban.

I realize that this White House is not exactly a big fan of deregulation, but maybe this a deregulation of communications protocols online is something they should consider. It might even put them back on Twitter.

Putting a CAP on Yglesias

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.

When Not to Blog About the White House

Politico sign in DC Metro from David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Last week I traded a series of Twitter “@ messages” with Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor, blogger and media critic. The first one asked:

Maybe you know. Q: why doesn’t Politico have a Ben Smith for the White House? Bets on whether they’ll get one if Obama wins?

He’s got a point. The Politico lists the organization’s designated blogs on its front-page in this order:

Ben Smith on Dems, Jonathan Martin on GOP, Shenanigans on Gossip, The Scorecard on Campaigns, The Crypt on Congress, Michael Calderone on Media, James Kotecki on whatever.

The Politico is literally blogging about “whatever” but not about “the White House.” So I guessed, in fewer than 140 characters:

Smith-Martin are a package deal, covering both primaries. Politico: more campaign, less governing? But that’s a great idea.

Prof. Rosen suggested in turn:

How about a PI post? Politico columnists for the Dems, Reps, Congress, Media, Gossip, Campaign trail, but no White House?

To which I replied:

Mike Allen certainly covers the WH. But not in blog form, true. Have friends down there, so I can ask. Possible PI post indeed.

And so I did, getting in touch with a half-dozen or so current and former Politico writers, asking for their thoughts on background. I also made an effort to get VandeHarris on the record, but they did not return e-mails by my less-than-rigorously self-enforced deadline.

So here’s what I could piece together:

  • When the Politico launched a little under two years ago, the presidential campaign offered the biggest opportunity first. Politico was first conceived as a newspaper to be called Capitol Leader — “Yet Another Newspaper Aimed at Capitol Hill” as the Washington Post had it. The Executive branch wasn’t even in the picture until John Harris and Jim VandeHei were.
  • As noted above, the newspaper that did emerge hired the much-acclaimed, much-accosted former White House reporter for Time and WaPo, Mike Allen. He writes big stories, is in good with Drudge, and produces content on a daily basis like everyone else. The format of his output is a secondary matter.
  • Most everyone I talked to seemed to assume that no matter who won the presidential election, Politico would increase their White House coverage after the election. After all, it’s the logical continuation of the campaign stories they are covering now. Some said they thought a blog would be involved, and no one volunteered the opposite.

One thing that occurs to me is that other major newspapers have blogs covering the White House as a beat, as do regional newspapers with Washington correspondents, but none of them command major audiences (even when they resort to Olympics T&A).

People care about the big stories that emanate from the White House, and they’ll get that from every newspaper and every political blog inside the Beltway, but few are looking for the day-to-day minutiae. Bush is a lame duck, interest has waned even in some of the bigger stories, and other national newspapers have moved their White House correspondents to the campaign trail.

The answer given reminds me a bit of the response I got in the summer of 2006 when I first wrote about the opening for a “Republican ActBlue”, viz., just wait. It may be worth noting, the person who did finally create one was not yet working on it at that time.

So, yes, the Politico will probably have a White House blog next year. Whether Politico writes the one that Jay Rosen is hoping for remains to be seen.

Photograph by David Boyle in DC via Flickr.

Soren Dayton, John Sasso and the Twitter Election

Once, this new thing called blogosphere reshaped the 2004 presidential campaign. And then, this new thing called YouTube influenced several contests in the 2006 midterms. So what’s next? Could Twitter change the outcome of the 2008 White House race?

Probably not just yet, but one thing is clear: What’s said on Twitter does not stay on Twitter. My former Hotline colleague Jonathan Martin reports:

An aide to John McCain was suspended from the campaign today for blasting out an inflammatory video that raises questions about Barack Obama’s patriotism.

Soren Dayton, who works in McCain’s political department, sent out the YouTube link of “Is Obama Wright?” on twitter at 12:31 today with the tag, “Good video on Obama and Wright.” It has since been taken down.

Twitter is an online device that allows users to send out short messages and links en masse through computers or PDAs.

An aside: The explanation of Twitter is cute; I remember not so long ago when they did that for blogs.

It should be clarified: the video is still on YouTube but Soren’s Twitter account — which I’ve followed since I first signed up — is gone. I like Soren and would like to think that he could post to his personal account whatever he’d like. The video highlights some Obama statements I think are objectionable and some where I think the outrage is overwrought; none of it strikes me as patently beyond the pale.

Then again, I remember well the controversy over John Edwards’ brief employment of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, bloggers like Soren, who embarrassed the campaign with their outlandish rhetoric. The issue is not whether the video Soren linked was less inflammatory than what they had written; that can be debated. The issue is that their public commentary (even if 140 characters or fewer) ran contrary to the standards of the campaign. In Edwards’ case, they were likely implied, not explicit standards. But as Martin notes,

McCain and his campaign have repeatedly said that they would stay away from personal attacks on Obama, but the temptation has increased as Wright’s words have dominated the race in recent days.

Last week, they included an op-ed that hammered Wright and Obama in their morning clip package emailed to reporters. The same day, a campaign aide they regretted doing so.

Informed that Dayton was circulating the video, McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said he had been suspended and “reprimanded by campaign leadership.”

“We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy,” she said.

One difference may be that Marcotte/McEwan had already proved controversial, with conservative bloggers making considerable noise about their independent blogging. Dayton had not yet caused that sort of embarrassment, and I frankly find it unlikely that it would have.

So did the McCain campaign overreact? Probably. Was this unfair to Soren? Maybe. But I’ve spent the last couple days saying that the Obama campaign has been too slow to cover its bases on Jeremiah Wright and Black Theology, so I must note that here the McCain campaign was quick to get in front of a potentially damaging story. Perhaps Republicans should see this as a blessing in disguise.

With 20 years distance, it seems ridiculous that the Dukakis campaign dismissed campaign manager John Sasso for distributing oppo research on then-rival (and onetime 2008 hopeful) Joe Biden. If it’s any consolation to Soren, he shouldn’t forget that Sasso was eventually hired back.

Update: All that said, I’m still joining Trevino’s Support Soren Dayton group on Facebook, and recommend that you do so, if you’re so inclined. Soren is very smart and a good guy for McCain to have. I especially hope they reinstate him so he can post for the campaign on RedState. Their stand is clear; it would be a mistake to turn this suspension into a sacking.

Click No Evil

Don’t be evil.

I’m sure that on more than one occasion over the past decade, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have wished they’d never committed their company to such a nebulous goal. After all, who gets to decide what’s “evil”? Sure, Google has an extensive corporate conduct policy which aims to do just that.
But the real problem is, you’ve just invited everyone to start looking for ways in which you might be, in their eyes, “evil.”

Page and Brin probably never imagined that Harper’s Magazine — once influential on policy and culture but now self-marginalized on the far left — would one day deem them evil for leaving their computers on all night. But maybe they should have, because a new feature in the magazine’s latest edition does pretty much that.

The tech blogosphere paid this article some attention over the holiday weekend, but none of those tracked by Techmeme bothered to scrutinize the article. But Ian Spencer, a friend and fellow former editor of the Oregon Commentator, has.

What follows is a letter he sent to Harper’s. As we figure it will never grace the pages of Harper’s letters page — let alone Google’s search results — he has allowed me to print here:

In light of Ginger Strand’s “Keyword: Evil” article in March 2008 I find it interesting that harpers.org contains code directing a user’s web browser to communicate with Google’s servers every time they visit a page on your site. This service is called Google Analytics, and it enables Harper’s management to easily view site traffic patterns. The supposed costs of “the cloud” must carry less weight than the benefits of website visitor statistics, at least for Harper’s. And if Ms. Strand and Harper’s would like to reduce Google’s electricity usage, they could always tell Google (and other search spiders) to not index their web pages.

There were also a few inaccurate and deceptive statements in the piece. For example, Google’s servers use standard techniques like caching and indexing to reduce the overhead of a single query to just a few megabytes worth of data, not “petabytes” as claimed by Ms. Strand. And the ominous-sounding “tens of billions of CPU cycles” used to process said data is by no means excessive. After all, a computer processor faster than one gigahertz goes through more than ten billion cycles every ten seconds. If you’ve read “Keyword: Evil” on harpers.org you’ve probably used more electricity than Google’s server does when you search for “journalistic integrity.”

But I expect inaccuracies when reading about computers in a non-technical magazine. Far more troubling is the notion that Google is evil simply because they use a lot of electricity. There are plenty of important issues to criticize them on: they have horrible privacy policies and censor users in China, for example. But attacking them for providing an energy-consuming service which Harper’s itself uses was, well, unexpected.

I would just like to add: “Keyword: Evil”? Really? No wonder Harper’s is so antagonistic toward today’s Internet — they’re still on AOL dial-up.

An Op-Ed We Just Might Blog

Memeorandum is not my homepage, although it might as well be — if you want to know what’s going on in the political blogosphere right now, it beats the pants off Technorati or Google’s BlogSearch. Normally here I’d say something about its impressive signal-to-noise ratio, but the fact is, there’s no noise. (On sister site Techmeme once, I saw a weeks-old story linked once. Once.)

It’s good enough that I tend to think that just by eyeballing it you can tell how big a particular story is. If that’s the case, then the Michael O’Hanlon/Kenneth Pollack op-ed in today’s New York Times may be the most talked-about newspaper article this year, at least:

Michael O'Hanlon-Kenneth Pollack opinion piece in the NYT, "A War We Just Might Win"

Unlike many, perhaps most, stories listed by Memeorandum this one attracted attention from both the pro-war/conservative/righty bloggers as well as the anti-war/progressive/lefty bloggers. If you’ve read the op-ed, it’s not hard to see why. O’Hanlon and Pollack both supported the Iraq war at the outset — the latter expressly advocating it in an influential book — but changed their minds as the war continued and the rebuilding project went awry. Nowadays the right is grateful for any sign that the war might be winnable, especially if it comes from Democratic-aligned intellectuals, especially if it runs on the New York Times’ left-leaning op-ed page. Meanwhile, the left has at least as much invested in ending the very same war that the right wishes to continue, in discrediting Pollack and O’Hanlon’s work, by pointing out inconsistencies and oversights, not to mention disputing their anti-war credentials.

It is not, however, an even split.

So who wins this battle of wills? Well, if you trust Memeorandum creator Gabe Rivera’s secret sauce, and you trust my count (I’ve included the complete breakdown after the jump, if you’re feeling argumentative), and we focus on this iteration of the page (there were others), several more large blogs of the right hopped on this story than blogs of the left tried to burst it like a bubble: 37 to 18, with 10 online newspaper items and non-aligned bloggers making up the oft-overlooked third leg of the blogospheric debate. Still, take this with a grain of salt — The Huffington Post has more traffic than many of these blogs put together, while righty traffic leader Instapundit linked it approvingly, but as usual offered too little commentary to make the cut. And in the course of writing this, I have seen more than a few perfectly major blogs not linked here — but I still think it’s a pretty good representation.

If there’s nothing else to be said here, it’s a fitting story to capture (political) blogosphere-wide attention — the rightosphere came to be after 9/11 and to support war on terrorism, of which Iraq is consdidered a piece, while the leftosphere was built around opposition to the invasion, and frustration with moderate liberals who supported it — like, say, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon.

Continue reading ‘An Op-Ed We Just Might Blog’

I Am My Blogger’s Keeper

At MyDD’s Breaking Blue miniblog, contributor Texas Nate is alarmed that the Wikipedia entry for the late Steve Gilliard had been nominated for deletion.

I didn’t agree with Gilliard much, and I don’t know Texas Nate at all, but I agree this development is worrisome. As I pointed out last week, it’s not the first time entries for bloggers have been so nominated — and as that effort was beaten back then, so should it be now.

As a Wikipedian in good standing, I added my two cents, reproduced below:

Argument to keep Steve Gilliard's entry at Wikipedia

The article certainly needs work — indeed, it was only begun upon the announcement of his passing on Sunday — but more to accord with Wikipedia style polices rather than meet NPOV guidelines.

When the big book on the liberal netroots is written, Gilliard will be more than a footnote. Wikipedia has the ability to record that now, and I believe it should.

Update: Good news — after a string of “keeps,” the silliness is over:

Easy call here. The only arguments for deletion are thinly veiled personal attacks. The New York Times only does obits if you are notable. Also, the claim that one must be notable enough to be in a paper encyclopedia is patently absurd. Agreed, notability should be considered, but in Mr. Gilliard’s case there is absolutely no question about that.

Hillary in Blogistan: On Blogads, The Netroots and Peter Daou

Hillary Clinton did not wait long after her weekend presidential campaign announcement to step foot in the blogosphere: By Monday her technically fledgling but long-assumed campaign had taken major steps toward engaging web users, starting with her three-night series of half-hour webcasts, which concluded just last evening. Moreover, her camp had sought specifically to engage the dedicated online activists who call themselves the netroots, by promoting the webcasts through the industry standard Blogads service.

Her detractors among those online activists did not wait long, either. At MyDD, one of the leading anti-Hillary sites on the left, Matt Stoller criticized her team for purchasing ads on some conservative blogs:

Why do people like HRC, no matter how often it becomes clear that wingnuts hate us, seek approval from wingnuts?

Before long, another animadversion came from former Nevada [and current online] talk show host (and recent Stoller employee) Taylor Marsh, who was upset to find she had been left out:

It’s not like her team doesn’t know I exist. I find it a little annoying that Clinton’s team thinks that people like me don’t merit advertisement, simply because our numbers don’t reach the one-hundred thousand mark.

We’ll address the specifics of these charges, but in order to do so, first let’s try to describe the buy itself:

Hillary Clinton's first BlogadThe Clinton team can’t or won’t say what they spent on the buy, but on Monday, Blog P.I. went digging through the extensive a la carte ordering page at Blogads to find out where they had made their buys and make a reasonably educated guess about how much they had spent.

While I am quite sure I did not locate every ad on every blog, the initial buy was worth at least $17,026 across at least 45 blogs. The buy comprised political blogs almost exclusively, liberal blogs overwhelmingly, and primarily those with a national reach. Nearly every liberal blog above 50,000 impressions per week picked up a blogad, though a few did not (as we’ll see below) and at least a few regional and small-traffic blogs also were included. The campaign bought some Premium ads (which are guaranteed to be the top ads visible) on liberal sites but generally stuck with the Standard ads, and went with the bargain buys on each of the conservative blogs included. And how many conservative blogs was that? I counted just four: Hugh Hewitt, Power Line, Captain’s Quarters and Wizbang Politics (i.e. not the front page), each worth between 550,000 and 150,000 impressions per week for a total $1,150.

Yesterday Blog P.I. contacted Clinton’s principal blog adviser, Peter Daou, for elaboration. As he explained, the first round was for the webcasts, the second round (which began last night) was for inviting supporters and potential supporters to submit guest blog posts. According to Daou, future buys will focus on particular issues Sen. Clinton wants to highlight, and in states and regions where she will be traveling. The strategy is not fixed, and more to the point, neither are the number of sites. “A blog being excluded has absolutely no implication, except we’ll get there next time,” Daou said. “We’ll try to get as many bloggers as possible.” For anyone who remembers Daou’s last gig, the blog roundup published by Salon which still bears his name, Daou often went out of his way to reach down and pull obscure blogs up into the mix. To be sure, he’s not spending his own money, and cheap as Blogads can be, even Hillary Clinton does not have unlimited funds. But to the extent he can, it’s reasonable to expect that Daou will keep doing so.

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And on Wednesday night, hours after the final webcast, the ad strategy did indeed shift: At the same time the buy expanded on liberal blogs, it disappeared from the conservative sites. To the Clinton team, it made sense to get attention from the right when the focus was on the webcast, but now that the ads are inviting people to submit guest posts to her site, inviting the “winguts” would indeed be a waste of time. Had they not made this distinction here, Stoller’s gripe surely would have been right.

But here’s the interesting thing: Blogads buys are one-week minimum commitments, though advertisers can change the specific ad as many times as they want — or remove it entirely. This is just what they’ve done: In order to stick to the plan, they have no choice but to pay Power Line and the rest not to run the ad, at least for a few more days (surely someone will compare this to farm subsidies, but no one has; one might say they’re just not into her).

For example, here is a screen shot taken last night, confirming two ads running on Power Line:

Power Line Blogad profile

But here is the Power Line sidebar as of last night:

Power Line blogad now disappeared

Not that the ads necessarily earned anyone’s approval: Dean Barnett, Hugh Hewitt’s co-blogger, took exception and* deemed it a misstep on Hillary’s part:

If Hillary is advertising to reach out to our core audience, she should save her money. I get your emails – I know none of you will be supporting Hillary in the Democratic primaries. … Presidential campaigns are often poorly and profligately run. Howard Dean, for instance, burned through a gazillion dollars getting absolutely no bang for his bucks and couldn’t tell you at the end of the day where all the money went.

Barnett surmised that Clinton’s “purchaser didn’t do his homework and decided that it would be a swell expenditure to run ads here and on Powerline” — but Barnett has been around the blogosphere (and was the Weekly Standard’s go-to guy on the leftosphere) long enough to know who Daou is, and to recognize that Daou would know exactly what to find at Power Line.

To this I will add just one more thing. On Tuesday, veteran Democratic operative and now Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told Hotline’s Blogometer:

We’re on some conservative sites because we’re not ceding any territory. We take nothing for granted.

To me this sounds a lot like the fighting spirit bloggers hold dearly — taking the fight to the other side’s camp. But that isn’t Sen. Clinton’s reputation with the netroots.

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Now to Marsh’s complaint. Her site is currently worth 42,806 views per week, just below the point where buys were near-automatic. She and Daou disagree on whether or not the campaign attempted to buy on her site, but as I do not have sufficient evidence to make a judgment, I’ll stay out of that question. Rather, let’s look at the circumstances:

hillary blogad secondAs I dug through Blogads earlier this week, I found that liberal blogs with considerably more readers than Marsh were also not included in the initial ad buy: Juan Cole, Sadly, No!, BartCop, This Modern World, After Downing Street and Burnt Orange Report among them. They did not complain, but when the ad focus shifted on Thursday night, some of them were brought into the fold. Now they’re even on the low-traffic personal blog of Matthew Gross, who happens to be John Edwards’ blog adviser. And, yes, Taylor Marsh.

Other blogs that arguably reach the same demographic but were excluded include TV Newser, not to mention some of Clinton’s constituents, Curbed and Gothamist. The latter snub is somewhat notable considering she did buy on Gothamist’s DC affiliate, DCist. Heck, why not buy on Cute Overload? That site reaches a lot of people, and certainly fits with her warm and fuzzy approach. Same goes for Treehugger. It’s these lifestyle blogs that seem to lie beyond the campaign’s purview, while the campaign is “rotating,” as Daou put it, ads throughout Advertise Liberally Blogad network. [Update: Charles Kuffner has a point.]

Additionally, Some of Marsh’s complaints are confusing to me. She wrote, for example:

Single proprietor bloggers may not get the traffic of the gigantic community blogs, but we do a lion share of the work out here as well. … Taking me out of the equation for a moment, shouldn’t Clinton at least help out a few of the small female only blogs, reaching out to females everywhere? You’d think that would be important to her.

Yet Feministing and Pam’s House Blend are just the kind of female-only blogs Marsh describes, and they were included. In fact, Pam’s House Blend along with female-led Firedoglake were among the few sites to pick up Premium ad buys. Similar complaints likewise were off-target. At MyDD, Texas Nate hit Clinton’s camp for not buying on a few specific regional blogs. One was Bleeding Iowa which, so far as I can tell, does not support Blogads.

And to editorialize for a moment, there is something unseemly about complaining that an advertiser did not buy ads on one’s site. Daou and the Clinton team are under no obligation to buy ads on anybody’s site. Yes, Marsh is a member of the netroots in good standing — she has worked for the SEIU and MyDD to cover a labor dispute in Las Vegas — but the same is true of dozens of other bloggers whom Clinton missed on the first round. As Daou said to me, it’s impossible to buy on every site. And at least as of this morning, Marsh has made no acknowledgment of her inclusion in the next phase of the Clinton ad buy.

If it’s not exactly extortion, it does betray the kind of myopic egocentrism that establishment Democrats use — sometimes as an excuse, sometimes not — to keep the netroots at bay.

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It was probably inevitable that there would be pushback when Hillary Clinton sought to engage the blogosphere. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the netroots’ legitimate policy disagreements with her have led to reflexive negative reactions to virtually anything she does.

Hillary Clinton's third and final first-week campaign webcastHere is an example, taken from MyDD this week: In a post titled “Playing the Electability Card,” Chris Bowers interprets a memo by Clinton pollster Mark Penn (as summarized by Newsday) — comparing his candidate favorably to her rivals — as playing the “electability card,” thereby denigrating the Democratic party as a whole and reinforcing Republican stereotypes. Problem is, there’s no Penn quote that clearly says this; the more plausible interpretation is that Hillary has more experience standing up to the kind of GOP attacks Bowers fears could be effective. Most perplexingly, the only Democrat whose “electability” is questioned in the Newsday article is Hillary — and in the second paragraph, no less. Although Penn’s claim that other campaigns are “stalled or falling” is dubious, there’s nothing scandalous about him putting Hillary Clinton in the best possible light. That is his job, after all.

Hillary Clinton’s longstanding position on the Iraq war puts her squarely at odds with the netroots, whose creation and cohesion owes more to the Iraq invasion and subsequent deterioration than any other issue. Short of a full apology, there’s nothing she can do. Even then, Edwards did that a long time ago, and Obama never supported it in the first place (though he never had to actually cast a vote on it).

Clinton’s online campaign must be one largely of damage control — managing expectations and placating bloggers who long ago made up their mind against her. Yet while Marsh and others (such as radio talker Ed Schultz) complain that she is not reaching out to progressives, through the webcast, blogads and forthcoming guest blogs, that’s exactly what she’s trying to do. Whether Clinton can soften the netroots opposition to her is an open question, but considering the uphill battle, it was probably wise to get started on it first thing.