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"A vast network of small media for Democratic politicians"
Over at GOTV, Alice Marshall is tracing the ten-year history of blogs in Virginia. Many of those bloggers have gone on to fame as bigtime national bloggers.
Here at Mandate Media, we're blushing since GOTV mentions our project - LeftyBlogs.com - near the tail end of that history.
Mandate Media has created a fabulous resource with local Lefty blogs. Want to know what Democrats in Kansas think of Senator Robert’s performance on the Intelligence Committee? Go to Local Kansas blogs. Want to follow the non-recovery on the Gulf Coast? Go to Louisiana and Mississippi blogs.
And this simple line which could serve as a mission statement -- why it is that we built LeftyBlogs.com:
Ordinary Americans, looking for something to read, have created a vast network of small media for Democratic politicians, who are now beginning to utilize it. Senator Reid is on record as saying ”blogs are all we have.” It is a remarkable achievement.
Knitting together the local blogosphere is critical work in 2006 and beyond. Using LeftyBlogs.com - and its BlogWire feature - we'll be able to move message faster and further than the other side.
Together, we will take back America.
Kari Chisholm | February 26, 2006 | Comments (0) |
National AFL-CIO Launches Blog
The AFL-CIO has finally launched a blog. Check it out. Taking the lead of our pal Tim Nesbitt, who blogged the big breakup as the president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, the folks at big labor hq have finally taken the leap.
It's a good start - but it's not quite right yet. The posts are all anonymous and they don't have open comments. As we've said before here at P&T, a blog is a conversation. And conversations don't work if there's only one person talking - and you don't even know who they are.
But kudos to the AFL-CIO for dipping one toe in the water. Now, get in there and swim!
(Hat tip to Communicate or Die.)
Kari Chisholm | February 16, 2006 | Comments (0) |
1 in 5 Americans Now Read Blogs
According to Gallup, just about 20% of Americans are now reading blogs either "frequently" or "occasionally."
That's just about the same as online video and music (22%) and auction shopping (23%). Email (87%) and news/weather (72%) still top the list.
Kari Chisholm | February 12, 2006 | Comments (1) |
Will the netroots become the new political establishment?
There's a great article over at In These Times about the role of blogs in politics. You should definitely read the whole thing, but here's a couple of highlights.
We have no interest in being anti-establishment,” says Matt Stoller, a blogger at the popular Web site MyDD.com. “We’re going to be the establishment.” ... Stoller predicts that as an organizing tool, “blogs are going to play the role that talk radio did in 1994, and that church networks did in 2002.”
Of course, blogs are just a tool. Saying that "blogs" will change politics is a bit like arguing that "television" changed politics. True, true, true - but that doesn't necessarily mean progressive change.
The very institutions that political bloggers often criticize have begun to adopt the platform, with corporate executives, media personalities, porn stars, lawyers and PR strategists all jumping into the fray. That may be why Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder and primary voice of Daily Kos, thinks the word “blog” is beginning to outlive its usefulness. “A blog is merely a publishing tool, and like a tool, it can be used in any number of ways,” he says.
On the other hand, there's something about blogging that's inherently democratizing.
To their most ardent advocates, blogs are standard-bearers of a core set of democratic values: participation, egalitarianism and transparency. ... they express the dream of Internet salvation: harnessing an inherently democratic, interactive and communal medium, with the potential to instantaneously tap into the collective intellectual, political and financial resourcesof tens of millions of fellow Americans to create a juggernaut for social change. According to Moulitsas, “The word ‘blog’ still implies a certain level of citizen involvement, of giving power to someone who is not empowered”
But, will blogs just be a new political establishment - without any of the democratizing effects promised?
Yet both the progressive blogosphere and the “revolutionaries” who dominate its ranks look a lot like the establishment they seek to overthrow. The report by the New Politics Institute—which was launched by Rosenberg’s New Democracy Network—notes: “Clearly, blogging is a world with a handful of haves, and a nearly uncountable number of have-nots. There are likely a few hundred thousand blogs in this country that talk about politics, but less than one-tenth of one percent of them account for more than 99 percent of all political blogging traffic.”
True enough. Of course, projects like our LeftyBlogs.com are exactly about pushing traffic out to the smaller, more local blogs.
Stay tuned. The world is changing.
Kari Chisholm | February 7, 2006 | Comments (0) |
Short & Sweet: Embrace the Preview Pane
Our pals over at TargetX (a higher-ed email marketing firm) have hit it on the head again with some great advice.
They remind us that many email programs (Outlook and Thunderbird included) have a "Preview Pane" - a window that shows the top couple inches of an email... easily allowing the reader to skip ahead.
That's right: Many of your readers won't dig in past the first few sentences of those long emails you send.
But instead of fearing the preview pane, marketers should embrace it. They should imagine all their recipients have preview ability, and then write accordingly. ...Too many promotional emails start off like a long, leisurely, we-want-you-to-get-to-know-us letter of a bygone era. ...
Imagine if some company got your name from a realtor and sent you an email that opened with, "Congratulations on your decision to look for a new house. The prospect of finding a new place to live is exciting, and many opportunities and experiences await you." You'd probably hit delete before even glancing at a second paragraph.
That approach breaks two important rules -- number 1, don't tell readers what they already know, and number 2, hurry up and explain what's in it for them. Make sure your first couple lines give a preview of what follows -- and make sure what follows is relevant to the reader.
True, true. Keep it short. Keep it sweet.
Ponder how you behave with email in your inbox - and remind yourself that everyone else does it the same way, too. Click, scan, delete; click, scan, file away; click, scan, delete; click, scan, reply; etc.
If your email doesn't work in the first three seconds, it's not going to work.
Kari Chisholm | February 3, 2006 | Comments (0) |
