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Archive for the 'William Beutler' Category

All the Rage #7: Iron Mom

Published by William Beutler on May 12, 2008 in Entertainment, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 0 Comments

We’ll keep it short this week, as I’m under the weather and already filing this late. But here’s what Wikipedians cared about last week, courtesy the Wikipedia-monitoring tool WikiRage:

  1. Article: Cyclone Nargis
    Why: Nargis is the name of the tropical storm that hit burma this past week, killing between 60,000 to 100,000 or more.
    Detail: This is Wikipedia at its best: when a major news story, such as the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake and tsunami, breaks and then continues to develop, Wikipedia can become an important news source. Although the page was created barely a week ago, it has been edited nearly 1,000 times and registered nearly 300,00 page views. Abd I’ll predict now that the earthquake near Chengdu will be in this slot next week.

  2. Article: Burma
    Why: See above.
    Detail: The page carries this warning at the top: “The current title of this article, Burma, is disputed. An alternate proposed title is Myanmar.” Not a big surprise to anyone who knows about the debate, but the tragedy seems to have fixed a spotlight on the issue. Since May 9, Wikipedians have expended more than 23,000 words debating it. Right now, I’d say the consensus is leaning back toward Myanmar.

  3. Article: Iron Man (film)
    Why: The number one movie in America, two weeks running.
    Detail: If Cyclone Nargis is Wikipedia at its best, this is Wikipedia at its most fanboyish. And that’s not a criticism, it’s just the fact: Wikipedia brings free information to the masses, but it can’t make them any more interested in weighty subjects than they might have been before.

  4. Article: Deaths in 2008
    Why: The most consistent page on this list, and probably will be as long as people keep dying.
    Detail: Although the list of those passing this week includes an astronaut and a country singer, you probably haven’t heard of them.

  5. Article: David Archuleta
    Why: This 17-year-old pop singer is the odds-on favorite to win this season’s “American Idol.”
    Detail: How do you think 26-year-old American kickboxer David Archuleta feels about this? Until February 14, his page resided at /David_Archuleta. Now it’s /David_Archuleta_(kickboxer)

  6. Article: American Idol
    Why: The flagship article of the popular TV show.
    Detail: With two more weeks to go, these two pages and possibly others will definitely stay active.

  7. Article: Mother’s Day (United States)
    Why: What could really be said about Mother’s Day? The page isn’t even very long.
    Detail: Oh, there’s plenty to vandalize. I coudn’t seem to find it, but apparently at one time there was a whole section devoted to NASCAR.

  8. Article: American Idol (season 7)
    Why: The page specific to the current season.
    Detail: I can’t quite figure out why this page doesn’t rank higher than the main page for the show, since there is in fact plenty more information about Season 7 here. My guess is that most American Idol fans are not Wikipedia experts, and don’t bother to drill down far enough — though it’s not exactly far — to find this page.

  9. Article: 2008 unrest in Lebanon
    Why: Another current event.
    Detail: What’s that, more violence in the Middle East? I’ll confess to not having followed this one closely, and probably this is true of many. It would almost be more noteworthy if Lebanon was not in crisis. In fact, the so-called Cedar Revolution in 2005 drew more attention than this.

  10. Article: Iron Man
    Why: The page for the superhero featured in the movie discussed above.
    Detail: Is there more more to say? Not really: most of the activity appears to be vandalism and the reverting of said vandalism.

    11. Holdovers this week: Deaths in 2008 is the lone page still on the list from 2 weeks ago.

    Falling off the list: Everything else.

    Recurring themes: You know, kind of… nothing, really.

    Honorable mention: How about one that didn’t recur? This time, to my surprise, none of the pages listed in the top-edited for the week were Featured Articles on the home page of the English-language Wikipedia. This certainly comes as a surprise, and I don’t expect it to be the case next week.

Four Blogs, Two Candidates and One Year Later

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Daily Kos, Defections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Instapundit, John Edwards, John McCain, Netroots, Online Fundraising, Primary fights, White House '08, White House '12 and William Beutler. 0 Comments

Balloon Juice, The Daily Dish, MyDD and Taylor Marsh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tale of the E-mail

Published by William Beutler on May 7, 2008 in Barack Obama, Democrats, E-mail, Election Night, Hillary Clinton, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

I’m not sure if interesting juxtapositions will be a trend here at Blog P.I., but here’s another: this time, the tell-tale campaign e-mails from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, sent out in the early morning hours.

From Team HRC, arriving in my inbox at 12:26 a.m.:

Hillary Clinton’s post Indiana and North Carolina campaign e-mail

Tonight’s victory in Indiana was close, and a margin that narrow means just one thing: every single thing you did to help us win in Indiana helped make the difference.

Every call you made, every friend you spoke to about our campaign, every dollar you contributed made tonight’s victory possible. And I couldn’t be more thankful for your hard work.

Every time we’ve celebrated a victory, we’ve celebrated it together. And tonight is no exception. This victory is your victory, this campaign is your campaign, and your support has been the difference between winning and losing.

Thank you so much for making this campaign possible. Let’s keep making history together.

And from Team BHO, arriving at 12:51 a.m.:

Barack Obama’s post Indiana and North Carolina campaign e-mail

We just won a decisive victory in North Carolina thanks to people like you.

Indiana remains too close to call. But what is clear is that we did much better than all the pundits predicted, despite Republicans changing parties to support Senator Clinton, believing she would be easier for Senator McCain to defeat.

Here’s where we stand.

As of Tuesday morning, we needed just 273 delegates to clinch the nomination. When the votes are fully counted Wednesday morning, we will have gained more than a third of them in a single day.

We have a clear path to victory. But now is the time for each one of us to step up and do what we can to close out this primary.

Please make a donation of $25 right now:

https://donate.barackobama.com/results

Thank you for everything you’re doing,

It doesn’t take a sophisticated campaign observer to notice the tonal difference in those letters. Obama scored a big North Carolina victory, and even sort of rescinds his victory speech congratulations to Clinton for taking Indiana. And like her just-barely-a-victory speech last night, Hillary’s e-mail does not declare the Indiana win as signifying anything except her supporters are to be commended. The writing is on the wall; or as the case may be, in her supporters’ e-mail inboxes.

Could Twitter Ads Help Stop Twitter Spam?

Published by William Beutler on May 6, 2008 in Advertising, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Twitter spam is back on my mind as I think about this morning’s TechCrunch report that Robert Scoble, the #5 most-followed Twitter user, has started tweeting paid advertisements. TechCrunch is shocked, shocked! to find out there’s advertising happening on Twitter, and alludes to speculation that Twitter’s founders will renege on a longstanding promise never to put ads on the Twitter website.

Some of this is driven by the fact that Twitter.jp, the Japanese-language counterpart, launched with advertising last month. Why ads on the Japanese version, but not the English? The conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to put advertising on the site later. That may be true, but of course, we already know that advertising happens on Twitter: many if not most of the accounts listed on TwitterBlacklist.com are primarily commercial in nature.

Which leads me to wonder, could Twitter ads be a partial solution to the problem of Twitter spam? After all, what these people are trying to do is reach many more people than their actual level of notability would attract. In lieu of other options, they’ve followed many more accounts than they could actually read, often using a bot to follow accounts automatically. How many of them would be willing to pay a small amount to place advertisements in the blank space underneath users’ left-hand sidebar? My guess is quite a few. In fact, so would quite a few others not presently engaging in spam-related activity.

One requirement for these ads could be that they must link to a Twitter account, which could then link out to where ever the advertiser wished. According to Valleywag, Twitter.jp ads do this, and it sounds to me like a fine way to keep the advertising conversational, like Twitter is meant to be. You know what isn’t conversational? A self-help guru whose promotions-only account follows 18,265 others with only 472 reciprocal followers.

Twitter advertising of this type would create an alternative to annoying other users with unwanted follower notifications while putting Twitter’s parent company Obvious on the slow road to profitability. Biz, Ev and Jack say they’ve been looking for a business model. Why not this one?

All the Mea Culpas #1

Published by William Beutler on May 5, 2008 in Metapost, WikiRage and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Just a note here that there was/will be no installment of All the Rage this week. This feature leans very heavily on the website WikiRage. I sent a note to WikiRage developer Craig Wood on Sunday, and he sent back a brief note saying that he’d look into it. Assuming WikiRage is operational again before too long this week, installment #7 will appear as normal next weekend.

Update: As noted by Mr. Wood in the comments, the error was easily fixed, WikiRage is back in action, and so will be our regularly scheduled Wikipedia excavation, next Sunday afternoon.

The D.C. Madam Suicide: Conspiring to Avoid the Obvious

Published by William Beutler on May 1, 2008 in Breaking News, Conspiracy Theories, District Politics, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Public policy and William Beutler. 1 Comment

The so-called “DC madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, died of an apparent suicide yesterday. Apparent to most, that is. As others suspected and even invited, it’s apparently murder to a few conspiracy theorists on the left.

Down With Tyranny, one of the least responsible blogs in existence, began its headline with “WHO MURDERED THE DC MADAM?” The Raw Story plays it straight, but the comments do not and the third just says “THEY MURDERED HER.” Pam’s House Blend raises the possibility, but admitted it may be “tin foil hat.” BooMan Tribune and The Reaction skirt the same line. But it’s not just the left: I’ve read Michael Silence at the Knoxville News for years, and I’m appalled to see him outright asking, “was it really suicide?” The commenters are no better.

To be fair, not all are doing this. The Brad Blog, known for relentlessly pursuing even the least plausible of voter fraud theories, apparently had relied upon her as a source, and sends his condolences. And some congratulations are due to Gawker’s Alex Pareene, who turns in perhaps his most cautious blog post ever.

One thing that anyone who wishes to speculate about such matters should think about: If someone was going to kill her, they probably would have done it before she turned over her phone records to ABC News. As Sister Toldjah points out, she was facing imminent sentencing and had recently promised she would not go back to jail. Although this sounds like a futile protest of the convicted, if the conspiratorial guessing leaned in the other direction, no doubt some would be playing this up as a key fact.

It bothers me that few are taking time to think about the unjust nature of prostitution laws. That she was prosecuted where the johns were not, and frankly that prostitution laws in most jurisdictions, the District included, take the same prohibitionary stance toward it that has made the drug war and the 18th amendment such obvious public policy failures. Palfrey’s service was fundamentally the same as businesses which operate legally in Nevada, and certainly a better model for what such a service should look like, compared to streetwalking, which is far more dangerous.

Didn’t mean to get on a soapbox here, but the Palfrey case should be considered a prime exhibit of why the current law is broken. Decriminalizing something does not equal a stamp of approval, only an acknowledgment that prohibition is poor public policy. Thanks in part to Eliot Spitzer, it’s been a banner year for prostitution busts already. The circumstances of his case made it an unlikely point to begin discussing a different approach to the problem of prostitution. Here’s hoping the death of Ms. Palfrey will be different.

That’s What FriendFeeds Are For

Published by William Beutler on April 22, 2008 in Barack Obama, Fred Thompson, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Online Campaigns, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web video, White House '08, William Beutler and YouTube. 2 Comments

As I am frequently given to blogging about the first thing I see in my e-mail box each morning, and commenting on the extremely limited tools on John McCain’s campaign website, here the twain meet. This morning I woke up to find John McCain, or someone using his name, had subscribed to my FriendFeed account:

John McCain joins FriendFeed

FriendFeed is one of the more recent Web 2.0 services on the scene, and some believe it could be the latest next big thing. Considering the McCain campaign’s sometimes uneven online strategy, this is a step in the right direction. It’s better to send your campaign out into the places where people are than to expect them to come to you, anyway. So, I subscribed in return:

Subscribing to John McCain’s FriendFeed

And it’s the campaign, all right — the favorited video indeed shows up on the official McCain YouTube channel as the most recently favorited video.

Better still, the favorited video was uploaded by McCain Girls, the parodic creation of left-leaning humor website 23/6. Sure, the joke may be on McCain, but the McCain campaign is willing to laugh along with the joke. The video favorited is of McCain literally laughing along with it.

Obama, of course, is on FriendFeed as well. He also has more online content piped through it: Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. McCain’s camp only lists the official blog’s RSS feed and YouTube account.

I know that’s not all they’re doing. McCain is on LinkedIn; earlier this month the campaign made clever use of the surprisingly resilient socnet, asking a question of the site’s memebers and receiving more than 3,000 responses.

John McCain on LinkedIn

I’m a bit surprised that McCain’s camp appears not to be using Flickr. Surely someone is taking pictures; during the Fred Thompson campaign we kept the Flickr account updated constantly with photographs taken by Thompson family friend Jim Rydell. (We released all photos under a Creative Commons license, thus providing quality photos of Thompson that supporters could use.)

McCain doesn’t appear to be using Twitter at either likely account (here or here), though supporters are giving the campaign a presence (here and here) on the increasingly zeitgeisty socnet. McCain’s camp did create an account on Digg, but they haven’t used the account since late last year.

Maybe all of this is not crucial, but the more social networks a campaign uses, the likelier it is they will reach people they would not have otherwise. Democrats will do all they can to portray McCain as old and out of touch, so presenting him well him to the young and with-it denizens of these online communities should take on added importance. Meanwhile, fundraising seems to be improving a bit, so maybe Pat Hynes will get a few extra hands to take care of these things.

Everything in Moderation: A Closer Look at Comment Spam

Published by William Beutler on April 19, 2008 in Comment Sections, Google, Metapost, SEO, Sock puppets, Spam and William Beutler. 4 Comments

At my ever more occasionally updated personal blog, I’ve long published a series of posts called “Great Spams of the Internet” wherein I highlight a particularly amusing bit of e-mail spam and even the occasional e-mail interaction. Once when a 419 scammer tried to get me to call him on the telephone, I replied:

Regrettably, I was born with no mouth.

He was very understanding, writing back the next day:

thank you sir thank for your mail all is understood well i can question you just of the condition you gave any please kindly make a way we can both talk

At least I think he understood. In any case, this is the long way around getting to my real point.

As you may know, I run a blog here. As you can probably guess, I get my share of spam comments; most are caught by the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. But then, most are fully automated and advertise prescription drugs, gambling websites or sex acts that would probably boost my unique visitor counts if I mentioned them, but I don’t need that kind of traffic.

However, a small percentage of it manages to evade Akismet’s filters and find its way into my moderation queue. In some cases, they are only barely distinguishable from real comments. In some cases not listed here, I’ve approved comments that I am sure were intended only to improve the SEO of the website linked, but were interesting enough to allow through on their own merits.

Most are not, but this doesn’t mean they’re entirely without value. Some of them are clever, some are just amusing. I’ve been holding onto a few of them to discuss here, so let’s open up the queue, if for no other reason than now I can finally delete them:

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

Here, somebody is pushing what appears to be a YouTube clone, even using a joking nickname YouTube acquired once the site itself was acquired by Google. In fact, the site turns out to be a combination of Google’s input forms. Though the IP address indeed traces back to the United Kingdom, the author is not especially concerned with proper English spelling or punctuation. They also have no system for keeping track of which websites they have already hit, or they just don’t care. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

Here is one that, at first glance, looks like a genuine comment: This was intended for a post that mentioned Ron Paul, just as the one above tried attaching itself to a post discussing Google and YouTube. But if you follow the link, it goes to a blog whose posts consist of only of one YouTube video and sometimes-relevant text copied from other websites — “scraped” as it’s called. And there’s a good reason why it sounds like a real comment: It was scraped from another comment from the same thread.

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

This one promotes yet another inscrutable blog, this time in a foreign language that I presume to be Turkish. I guess this because the IP address resolves to Izmir, Turkey. The one above resolves to Istanbul, Turkey. The two cities are not close by, so they are probably not the same person. But if Turkey is a hotbed of comment spam, that’s news to me.

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

Undoubtedly, this one is my favorite. Like the Wikipedia vandal whose edit summary consisted of “Blanked the page” or the panhandler who admits he needs the money for booze, “Sohbet” is admirably honest about his intentions. I might even consider throwing him a link, except that the website no longer exists — less than a month after he was trying to extract Google juice/build traffic for it. Also of note: the IP address resolves to Antalya, Turkey. Still, if Turkish comment spam is a known phenomenon, I can’t find any discussion about it.

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

Funny at first, but tedious. I get a lot of these, and it’s kind of similar to another common tactic I’ll get to in just a bit. Flattery will get you everywhere with some people, but not me. Also, the linked site is in Russian. Russian spam at least I am familiar with.

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

Better than YouTube! Quite a claim. Surprisingly, the website is well-designed, coherent and legitimate. For someone who just wanted to find videos related to a presidential or prospective VP candidate, it might actually be better than YouTube. So here we can start to draw a clear distinction: Some spam comment campaigns aim to promote fake websites that seek ad revenue or to promote another website. Others are spammy promotions for real websites; it’s very possible the creators of this website don’t know exactly what their SEO is up to. But I’m not particularly offended by this comment. It doesn’t add to the conversation so I won’t approve it, but it got the general subject matter of this website correct, it’s vaguely conversational, and it doesn’t represent itself as anything other than what it is: a pitch.

Example spam comment received at Blog P.I.

Lastly, this one I’m including not because it’s compelling, but because it’s so common. Also, because it represents the dishonest counterpoint to the previous example. Here, the commenter announces enthusiasm for the targeted website (in this case mine), then immediately starts pitching another website. Notice that his subject matter is completely off-base with what Blog P.I. is about. The targeted post — which I wrote in July, 2006 — included exactly one use of the word “wedding,” in a throwaway reference to New York Times announcements page thereof.

Predictably, the website being promoted is commercial in nature, but doesn’t offer anything for sale itself. What it does, though, is link to pages on a real wedding supply website, which presumably hired the spammer to boost their search engine ranking. A bit of rudimentary sleuthing reveals the SEO’s identity and company; he’s using his real name (which is something, I guess) and he didn’t even register the URL anonymously.

But I’m not going to single him out with a link or textual mention that could turn up in a search engine. He’s not doing anything illegal and, as noted above, similar practices are exceedingly common. I’ve been a critic of certain SEO practices, but I’m fascinated by also them, and clearly I think some tactics are better than others. The way I see it, if you’re going to do black hat SEO, why not do it with some style?

Also, the joke is on them: Every link in my comment section is automatically assigned a nofollow attribute.

I Want to E-Mail All the Little People

Published by William Beutler on April 19, 2008 in Advertising, E-mail, Netroots and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Some months back I signed up for an e-mail list administered by, in varying combinations, Jane Hamsher, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Stoller and Markos Moulitsas. The pitch at the time was for Stop the DC Establishment, a campaign to persuade journalists of “Petraeus’s long record of errant judgment in Iraq.”

The message shifted over time, asking list members to back the Democrats’ SCHIP plan (unsuccessful), oppose the January FISA bill (unsuccessful) and sign an FEC complaint about John McCain’s campaign finances (unresolved but likely unsuccessful). In every case, the list was a call-to-action directly furthering the Leftroots’ political goals.

This week, I received an e-mail from the same firedoglakeaction@gmail.com account used to send out most of these messages. But this one was just a little different:

Jane Hamsher’s commercial solicitation on behalf of Glenn Greenwald

A few “to be sure” statements: It’s their list, anyone can unsubscribe, and Greenwald’s book is undoubtedly sympatico with their previous messages.

But let’s be clear about what they’re doing: They are making commercial use of an e-mail list subscribers joined for expressly political reasons. More to the point, the list is now being used to advertise a product by one of the list’s owners.

I have no way of knowing the reaction of people on the list who signed up out of genuine support for their cause (as the blurred name above suggests, I didn’t sign up as myself) but I can certainly imagine some will be irritated that their interest in Greenwald’s political activities implies an agreement to receive commercial solicitations on his behalf. I’m a little irritated, if that counts for anything.

I actually wasn’t going to write about this, until I heard this week that Greenwald and Hamsher barely attended the Wednesday Dupont Circle event; apparently they showed up at the very end and gave a “hard sell for Greenwald’s book.” Two is one short of a trend, but if it becomes that, they could risk squandering their readers’ loyalty.

The New Hotlineness

Published by William Beutler on April 18, 2008 in Beltway media, Hotline, Seriously, Website Design and William Beutler. 0 Comments

I’d been hearing the rumors for a few weeks but, finally, the new National Journal site design has had its debut. But on a Friday?

In Washington, bad news always gets released on Fridays. The idea is to bury it just as the week’s traditional news cycle is winding down — as reporters are racing to get out of, or heading out on the, town.

Is that what’s going on here? Here’s the page specific to The Hotline, so you be the judge:

The New Hotline website design on National Journal

It’s certainly much more modern than the National Journal website of old (see below right). You can’t tell from the screen shot, but there is just as much actual content on the page; it’s just been pushed below the fold. Now it resembles nothing so much as a wonkier version of Slate (which has had its own disastrous redesigns, not that I’m calling this one disastrous).

But that red is so neon it looks like it belongs on the cover of Wired, and for the moment it clashes badly with the colors of the sponsor’s advertisement.

Classic (Old) Hotline website designIt also looks odd next to the darker red, which is more representative of the colors used across the site. Indeed, click over to Congress Daily and National Journal (aka “The Magazine”) and you may think you’re losing your eyesight.

On the other hand, I count two links to my old online column/daily blog report, The Blogometer, apparently the only National Journal feature with two links on this particular page. That alone is enough to get a thumbs-up from me.

Well done, National Journal!

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