Comments on: Echo Chamber Or Vehicle Of Change?

By: William

William — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 15:26:36 +0000

Minnesota has so many political blogs because there are so many liberal nut cases and then real folks can have political blogs just pointing out all the hypocritical, loony thing s that the liberals do.

By: mitch

mitch — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 22:10:03 +0000

"My favorite part of local blogs are that you don't need facts."

Fact: You are immune to humor. It's called "Hyperbole".

However, it is a fact that both Ollie and Duncan Black are employed by Soros' front company, Media Matters.

Or isn't that the kind of "fact" that you recognize?

By: taylor

taylor — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 20:16:05 +0000

There's also this, which is interesting.

By: ktf

ktf — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:29:35 +0000

My experience is that blogs always threaten to be more talk than thought (and this includes my own largely non-political blog.) If influence is measured in thought-leadership, the editorial filters of the better newspaper op-ed sections and opinion journals seem to produce better political thinking. I don't know if this is inherent in blogging.

But their nature, blogs seem to be less modulated; especially in the early days, there was that road-rage like sense of being both threatened and invulnerable. And my experience has also been, present company excluded, that political blogs are clannish. If you're right-leaning you also tend to be right-linking.

Blogs seem to have power as a corrective and as a connective tissue among fellow-travelers.

By: bjhokans

bjhokans — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 22:07:35 +0000

“Wholly owned by George Soros”

My favorite part of local blogs are that you don’t need facts.

By: MBerg

MBerg — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:55:30 +0000

Oh, yeah:

13 things about local blogs and local bands...

Bitter much?

No, me too. My band fecking rawked. And other than a gig in the mainroom opening for Thin White Rope, we went nowhere.

Fecking philistine fans.

By: MBerg

MBerg — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 18:57:00 +0000

Oh, where to start:

Kevin: "do you draw a distinction between a blog like Anti-Strib, which is entirely opinion driven, and the blogs run by actual freelance writers and reporters who publish real work on their blogs?"

You draw any distinction you want. Any blogger at any time can swerve from opinion to serious reporting to catblogging and back again. John Hinderaker notched Dan Rather and also liveblogged the Miss Universe contest.

My blog is largely but not exclusively political; I started it with no expectation of ever being found, much less having an impact. Navel-gazing analysis of the medium is lost on me, frankly; it is what it is, to whomever it is it.

Weren't those SD blogs actually astroturf?

No, they weren't. They did take money from the campaigns - unwisely, as both bloggers later admitted. That doesn't make them any more "astroturf" than, say, Atrios or Ollie Willis (both wholly-owned by George Soros). Judge their credibility accordingly, of course. I do.

Finally, Wayne Tedrow Jr. made some good observations - and then this:
The GOP has more than its share of young Karl Rove wannabes who are trying out the tactics they learned during their precious tenure at the CRNC in DC.

Y'know, for all the influence Rove supposedly has on all of us, I wish the damn check would arrive already.

By: rew

rew — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:39:39 +0000

Weren't those SD blogs actually astroturf?

and paid for by the campaigns, at that.

By: mike s

mike s — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:26:37 +0000

These guys hope that the righty blogosphere can reproduce the results achieved by blogs in South Dakota's U.s. Senate race. Pressuring traditional news outlets in line. Not beeping likely with the novelty element gone.

Weren't those SD blogs actually astroturf?

By: jeanfid

jeanfid — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 16:27:15 +0000

i prefer to look at this from in between. for me it isn’t about who has more out there or whose scored biggest in bringing down someone else, though that may be the impetus for starting a blog. i am interested in something other than the soundbyte journalism of the msm. blogs do go beyond that, and thank god. the layered discussions reveal far more than who’s ahead or what made whom vote how.