Also instructive is the similarly empty Endorsements page.

This kind of thing is all too common in political campaign websites, even for members of Congress who are not a complete waste of an office budget. I suppose this persists because just about anybody can put up a campaign website which means anybody is hired to do so. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard an online campaign vendor complain about the numbskulls in their industry… well, maybe I could have bought a U.S. Senate seat.

Some time overnight I was followed by the Twitter account @vanityfairer, d.b.a. “Vanity Fair Wayfarer” (whence the image above right). As a subscriber to the magazine (at least assuming my reup went through) I followed back and clicked on the sidebar link to learn more. Instead of finding the Vanity Fair website or a personal blog, it directed me to a blog post at Web2.0h…Really? titled:

VanityFairer: The Magazine’s Social Faux Pas?

About which I first thought, yeah, Vanity Fair should have scooped up the account before this person got to it. But it turns out that’s not what the author meant. Here’s what he did:

Vanityfairer [is] a Twitter “fan”feed by someone who identifies “her”self only as Vanity Fair Wayfarer and whose bio reads only “I heart Vanity Fair magazine.”

“Her” updates are really pretty good–mainly pointers to stuff about, in or related to content from the celebrity-addled, scrumptiously visual, annoyingly literate and therefore-hard-to-ignore glossy. …

It looks to me like the Twitter feed is an undisclosed VF inside job. Vanity Fairer is following a conspicuous list of 51 prominentos from the worlds of technology and media [including Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, WSJ's Kara Swisher, 2.0 author Sarah Lacy, John Dickerson of Slate, Gawker, Ana Marie Cox and TechCrunch, A-list tech bloggers plus a few C-list hangers-on like me].

The trick to building a Twitter posse, as savvy Twitsters know, is to “follow” people whom you hope will follow you back–or actually maybe write a blog item about the Twitter stream to gain some 2.0 brainshare [!]. So there is clearly something tactical and ambitious about Vanity Fairer’s “following” list. Vanity Fairer appears to be following none of her own personal friends, for instance. A bit curious.

Perhaps, but I think not the way 2.0h…Really? blogger Craig Stoltz sees it; his site tagline says “A Skeptical Look at Emerging Web Technologies” but here I think this skepticism is misplaced. As one who has started a “fake” Twitter account or two in my day (hint: a clue to one of them is embedded somewhere in this post) I don’t see any evidence that this is anything but a fan of the magazine who decided to fill a void left by Conde Nast’s apparent unwillingness to embrace the service. In fact, I think Stoltz’s evidence points in the opposite direction.

First of all, I can’t see why a secretly official account would be any more likely than an amateur to search the VF name on Twitter search and add people mentioning the phrase. In fact, I think the opposite is more likely: that the Vanity Fair Wayfarer has no inside connection and so is simply following people who have indicated an interest (which is how she found me) because that’s the only way to get tweeps’^* attention.

Moreover, if the account was itself being followed by other luminaries of the Twitterverse, that I might take as a reason to believe it was real. That would show insider connections; instead this Twitter account seems more to be standing outside the velvet rope, waving at the bouncer and insisting her friends are inside.

Plus I just don’t see the rhyme, reason or motivation for VF to spend any time on this underperforming (approx. 650 followers) account.

Stoltz does point to a recent-ish Facebook stunt by Vanity Fair’s web team, which was kind of amusing and although lacking for even circumstantial evidence, it does mildly insinuate that VF might be game for this kind of trick. If so, it’s a good one and a bad one: the account is visibly lacking in design sense, let alone an art department. And because Graydon Carter would probably Toby Young anyone who tweeted something like:

When will either-or tech pundits realize that it’s okay to be comfortable with contradictions — a la Vanity Fair’s fluff-depth combo?

Meanwhile, I wonder if Vanity Fair knows that @ev and @biz will hand them this account if only they ask:

^* I guess I am letting this word into my vocabulary. But not “twestival”. Never.

My reason for thinking so began after Mickey Kaus checked his e-mail inbox late last week, and asked:

Will Obama ever stop asking me for money? Or is it all fundraising, all the way out? … Not only is he still milking his supporters for money, he’s doing it in an obnoxious way, no? “Join us at the inauguration” turns out to mean “pay for other people to party at the inauguration you’re not going to”!

He’s got a point there. I’ve been on Obama’s list for more than a year now — my first post of 2008 was about how Obama’s campaign sent the year’s first campaign e-mail that New Years Day wee morning hours — and I’ve been getting (and half-paying attention to) them ever since. Here is my unofficial count (and anyone is welcome to do a recount) of the e-mails “Paid for by Obama for America” I have received in 2009, followed by that ubiquitous red button:

• Join us at the Inauguration, Jan. 3, Obama for America
• Our first guest, Jan. 6, Michelle Obama
• Be there for history, Jan. 7, Bill Clinton
• Deadline: Midnight, Jan. 8, Barack Obama
• Re: Midnight deadline, Jan. 8, David Plouffe
• Your call to service, Jan. 12, Michelle Obama

It’s a permanent campaign, all right.

He’s not President of the United States yet, I’ll give him that. But you would tend to think his fundraising goals have been satisfied — especially since his campaign let departing staffers have an extra month’s paycheck, plus their laptops and BlackBerrys (and a tip of the hat to Research in Motion’s PR department for getting reporters following AP style to not spell it “Blackberries”).

And you know what this reminds me of, as it might not remind most inside the Beltway? It’s not altogether unlike Wikipedia’s constant fundraising. As recently as December, Valleywag criticized the Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales-led on-site (always a banner across the top) fundraising drive mostly for being annoying and evidentiary of Wales being a poor leader of the website with the most comprehensive description of Regional variations of barbecue.

By early January, however, it turned out that Wikipedia had beaten its 2008 fundraising goals to the tune of $6.2 million. In the interests of disclosure as well as narrative, I’ll say that I donated as much to the Wikimedia Foundation this winter as I’ve donated in any one instance since Hurricane Katrina. So with that said, as I’ve been editing Wikipedia recently, I have often noticed this banner at the top of each article:

And what happens when you click on it? You come to a page with a letter of thanks from Wales. It looks like this:

Okay, so maybe Valleywag has a point about Wales as the public face of the website with the most informative biography of Portland, Oregon home furnishings salesman and television pitchman Tom Peterson.

And then, your eye drifts down the page to see this:

The permanent campaign, indeed.

P.S. I haven’t even mentioned that also this afternoon, Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC was asking $100 for this:

Don’t even get me started.

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.

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”.

If you’ve already forgotten the old version, compare with this, although it doesn’t show the two columns that may have saved space but ultimately produced a confused chronology.

More promising, Slate has turned its blogs-in-name-only (BINOs?) into real deal blogs, complete with permalinks. For years, the site’s handful of blogs were published using the same software as its news articles. In fact, it wasn’t really clear which were columns and which were blogs; until recently, only Kausfiles read as you would expect of a blog. Here is his page now:

This redesign is actually a throwback to the old Kausfiles.com, which Kaus published on his own in the late 1990s until agreeing to be acquired (and paid) by Slate. And it is Kaus who probably benefits the most; because Slate’s software couldn’t automatically create permalinks, if he wanted to make it easy for someone to link, he would have to build an anchor tag by hand. And making writers learn to code detracts from what they’re best at: writing.

There are still some kinks to be worked out. If you click on “Kausfiles” from the front page sidebar, it brings you not to the blog itself but to a list of recent headlines, some of which are oddly duplicative. Better then is to just type kausfiles.com into your address bar, which brings you to http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/default.aspx, which is the screen capped above. That’s still at least one /blogs too many, but at least the permalinks are now search engine-friendly (including words from the title as opposed to randomly assigned numbers).

And if you think you can prune that back to http://www.slate.com/blogs/ and find a list of Slate’s blogs, well, no… and you may see a little farther up Slate’s skirt than either of you had bargained for:

Thank you for being so welcoming! What’s that… join, you say? Well, why not? Here I am:

And in fact, I now have an account with Slate that allows me to… well, I’m not quite sure. Almost certainly nothing, I am fairly sure. But if Blog P.I. moves to Slate, you’ll be the first to know.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

• C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.
• NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”
• More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.
• The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).
• The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.
• NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).
• There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

• I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).
• Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).
• Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.
• If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.
• The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

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.

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.

Especially the e-mail interviews with his grandmother in Florida. But now this is really getting out of hand:

(Click the image to visit the site.) I’m not even sure what “Chuckolyte” is supposed to mean. Is it a play on “electrolyte”? Is it supposed to sound like “chocolate”? Not that either would make any sense. Nor have the folks behind Cerebral Itch explained what it’s supposed to mean. [Update: Via the "Viva Chuck Todd Editorial Dept." in the comments, it is a play on "acolyte." Makes sense now, but a little convoluted.]

A former fellow Hotliner asked the other day what Chuck thinks of his newfound following. I haven’t asked, and I’m not going to bother him with this. This is partly because my answer was: I’m sure he’s aware of it, but I’m also sure he isn’t paying it that much attention.

I will give them this — the graphics are all pretty good, even this weird, stylized icon of the best goatee in cable news:

*Arguably bigger, since he gave me my first paying job in Washington.