Not safe for work from the founder of RedState.
“The nation loses the only goat f*&king child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter’s retirement.” So says Eric Erickson on Twitter.
[...]Not safe for work from the founder of RedState.
“The nation loses the only goat f*&king child molester to ever serve on the Supreme Court in David Souter’s retirement.” So says Eric Erickson on Twitter.
[...]That headline makes no sense, but neither does The New York Times’ decision to make a food blog remove the slogan “All the news that’s fit to eat.”
[...]As if anyone needed yet another reason that the fair use exception to copyright is critical to the blogosphere. Check this out. CNN is trying to keep footage of its jerk reporter arguing with Tea Party protestors instead of covering them.
[...]If you check out the top of the BNN home page, you’ll see a weekly tally of the number of click thrus from a BNN rss feed, widget or web page to the bloggers we cover. Towards the beginning of the year, it was running at about 1.1 million [...]
You might want to wander by and submit your names. I noticed dozens of good blogs tracked by BNN that haven’t been mentioned yet.
[...]And the newspaper leaves the name of this dastardly blog unknown to its readers. I bet I know which blog she means.
I don’t follow BNN’s DelMarVa site every day, but of all our sections this is the one that creates more sparks and more angry email to [...]
You’d think this was satire or maybe something thought up by the KGB. Nope.
[...]The Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association seems to think it can block the state’s newspapers from covering post-season play unless the newspapers pay the athletic association.
The most interesting bit is this: “The WIAA is asking a Portage County judge to rule that the organization has the right to “control the [...]
… or anyone else in the public who already paid for it. John Conyers wants the public — and libraries — to have to pay again. Why vote Republican when Democrats will give away stupid corporate welfare too?
[...]Last week, the daily newspaper in Memphis revealed a searchable database of the state’s concealed carry permit holders. Predictably, my fellow gun nuts went, well, nutzer, organized the troops and began the barrage of nasty emails and phone calls to the newspaper.
It is easy to understand why 2nd Amendment [...]
The argument is solid and the reasoning impeccable. Please send us money. (Maybe then I won’t have to turn BNN into a bank so we qualify for TARP money.)
[...]BNN is: You can follow any state at www.twitter.com/STATENAMEbnn (For those of you inside the beltway, replace STATENAME with the name of the state you want to follow. Really, Mitch, I weep for your future.)
or
You can follow BNN news and my random thoughts here. (We’ll follow you back since [...]
One of the services we use to track who is reading us and how they land on BlogNetNews gives us a neat overview of what organization is supplying the Internet access used to get to us. One way they let us look at it, is which large companies and government [...]
If bloggers agree on anything, it should be on the freedom of information — openness and accountability on the part of our government. The Obama administration has been getting a great ride with lots of promises to be more open than the Bush administration.
But maybe not so much … [...]
Update: All fixed. Thanks Tyler.
Some parts of BNN will be down this afternoon and evening as we restore bits of the database that mysteriously disappeared in the transition yesterday. Sorry for the interuption.
[...]For the first time, BNN’s dozens of local and topical editors are going to start getting paid for the work they’ve put in over the last year. Some of the ads appearing on BNN will now belong to and be controlled by the local editors.
If you want to be one [...]
Each section’s directory front page lets you sort the section’s blogroll by category (determined by the local editor usually based on ideology and geography, i.e. conservative or South Georgia) as a tool to help readers and researchers find similar or related blogs.
Each blog now has its own directory page [...]
The purpose of the dashboard is to help bloggers and their most avid readers quickly find what’s popular based on the number of comments reported in rss feeds, the number of clicks from BNN readers or the number of links from other bloggers in the same city, state or [...]
Each section’s blogwire page is focused on what is happening now.
Readers will quickly find the latest posts in the center column. In the left column, search is at the top and the hot topics of the last 100 posts are immediately below.
Improvements:
Our old section fronts have now been split into three sections — the blogwire, the dashboard and the directory. We have been trying to jam too much information into too few pages making them confusing and slow. Hopefully that’s fixed.
The blogwire is aimed at average readers to give them [...]
We have a brand new front page here.
Most important, we are now tracking how many BNN readers use our services to visit blogs every week. BNN produces twitter streams, rss feeds with thousands of subscribers, automated email alerts, headline widgets that now run on hundreds [...]
Stay tuned to [www.blognetnews.com] for full details on how the new design works. Once it is up and you have comments, complaints, ideas, slobbering praise, bribes etc. you can email me at editor@blognetnews.com.
If you haven’t seen the prototype, go here to the Virginia political blog section.
–Dave Mastio, editor
[...]A little while back, we began tracking how many visitors went from BNN’s main site, the rss feeds BNN produces and the headline widgets that hundreds of bloggers all over the country have put on their sites. The weekly numbers have been astounding and last night, they reached [...]
This is one of those sunlight initiatives that should appeal to bloggers of all stripes. What the hell is in this thing?
[...]The Sammie Awards have tens of thousands of dollars behind them. They obviously lean right, so maybe only some BNN types need apply.
regardless, the categories look pretty good:
SAMMY CATEGORIES
Best Video: Produce a video (drama, satire, documentary, etc.) about economic and/or individual liberty in relation to an [...]
… and more importantly, is it a real business?
Here’s an attempt at making money. Here’s what Wired had to say. My friend John Wilpers was involved in an earlier pioneering effort in Boston.
[...]Cool link that will let you compare low literacy in your county between 1992 and 2003 as well as compare with statewide rates and neighboring counties. Worth playing with.
[...]… and the technology chops to do it … but a little short in the business plan department? Maybe you should look into this.
[...]This is just beyond awful. For those who publish full feeds from soapblox sites, BNN maintains archives for some time for use in our search feature. If you can’t get things back from Soapblox, contact us and we’ll see if we can pull them together for you.
Some of the [...]
This Paul Mulshine guy is a real goofball. (Hat tip: Katie Granju)
Mulshine is profoundly ignorant. He doesn’t even understand the institution he purports to defend.
Some time he should pick up a newspaper. At the back of the main section or the local section, he will find something called [...]
In my sporadic blog reading over Christmas, I’ve noticed a good number of blogs disappearing from the map, perhaps from election fatigue. I am going to write about the ones I wish would come back over the next couple weeks.
If you have nominees or links to posts about disappearances in [...]
If you’ve missed it, there’s a delicious spat going on between the Huffington Post and number of Chicago area publications. Well not really a spat, since the Huffington Post has refused to say anything since this all began. (Update: Wired has some HuffPo comments.)
Three good ideas sent our way and now implemented on the Virginia political blogs prototype page.
1) The … link to the full post at the end of each excerpt is gone. Now replaced with a “>>read more” link that is more intuitive and should drive more traffic. (Thanks [...]
… is now up on our Virginia political blogging page. I hope you’ll stop by, explore and let me know what you think. Our goal was to strip down the images and get the page working faster while simplifying navigation by spreading it over three pages. The main page [...]
If you haven’t stopped by, you might want to give some Illinois political bloggers a visit since they are on the scene.
These are some of my favorites:
Doug Welch (BNN’s Illinois editor), Capitol Fax, Illinois Review, With Both Hands, Tribune’s The Swamp, Backyard Conservative, [...]
A new feature that will be part of BNN’s redesign next month is working out particularly well in the test phase, so I can’t keep it under wraps any more. We are now able to count visitors from BNN widgets, BNN feeds and the BNN main site out to the [...]
Update: WaPo does the same thing to local blog MediaBistro .
A day doesn’t go by when I don’t hear some example of a local blogger breaking a story and the local paper following but, whoops, forgetting to credit the blogger who actually broke the story. More often than not, [...]
Added a bunch more to BNN, RightyBlogs and Progressisphere.
Here are a few:
[cranfordpundit.wordpress.com]
If you know blogs that need to have their feeds updated or should be added to one of BNN’s sections, email me the URL and where you think it belongs [...]
We’re working through a huge backlog of applicants to BlogNetNews, RightyBlogs and Progressisphere.
Here are a few added today:
[irritatedtulsan.wordpress.com]
[bungalowbillscw.blogspot.com]
[...]An interesting opportunity has come up for some bloggers who are going to be in or near Washington D.C. on election night — live blogging at the HQ of a major national media outlet. If you’d like details, email me at editor@blognetnews.com.
[...]This is not a post about the need for bloggers to be united in wearing jamies while they type. It is about getting smart before you find yourself legally exposed and blogging goes from hobby or business to full-time nightmare.
There are three ways to start protecting yourself — learn media [...]
Late last year, BNN began asking local bloggers to take over administration/editing of some of our state and city sites. We have something like three dozen now and are just about to add a few more. One purpose is to have people closer to the action notice and add new [...]
This is a subject that bloggers of all stripes ought to be able to agree on — we, the public, are the ones that own the laws that our state legislatures and city councils write. Unfortunately that’s often not the case. Cities and states claim they own the copyright [...]
Over the next few hours, there will be design tweaks to all three columns of BNN’s front pages intended to make it easier for readers to go direct to your blog without any accidental clicks on links to internal BNN pages.
In both the blogroll on the right and in BNN’s [...]
The Sunlight Foundation, which does God’s work in my opinion, has a cool new tool to let anyone check which companies are sponsoring parties at the Republican and Democratic Party conventions. Just choose “host” and then stick in the name of some local employers. Bloggers can have a field [...]
More than a few times in the last couple years, newspaper industry friends have asked, in a way suggesting that they already know the answer, whether blogging may be a fad — if it will whither away over time. One reason they come to this conclusion is they think they [...]
C-Span has launched a new site for the upcoming Democratic convention that is going to highlight selected blog posts discussing the goings on in Denver. If you are interested in getting some attention for your site, you have to submit individual posts through a form on the bottom left [...]
Iowa political blog by state party official didn’t violate any of the government’s unconstitutional rules.
In BNN news, if you use one of BNN’s full state feeds, it is time to switch over to feedburner. Each of the feeds is formatted like this so you don’t have to go looking: [...]
Since I am on vacation, I haven’t put much time into researching this, so I offer it almost without comment. Their web site seems legit. Their client list names a lot of big companies including HP and Disney. If you learn anything interesting or participate, please add it to [...]
Posting will be light. Answering emails and updating BNN sites that don’t have their own editors will be slow. We’ll be back to full speed on Monday the 18th.
[...]Update: OpenLeft takes a swing at McCainiac astroturf
Hat tip to Ohio blogger Jeff Coryell for a tweet linking the latest article from The Washington Post on John McCain’s horrendously stupid practice of encouraging supporters to spread predigested talking points into comment sections all over the Internet. John, [...]
Last fall, I was invited to a new media conference run by Jeff Jarvis. There I met one of the guys helping Jeff run it — Dave Cohn. Dave has come up with the idea that maybe donations from communities of like-minded or even just interested people are one [...]
A few blogging tidbits:
Gripes from Firedoglake that Minnesota liberal blogs haven’t been credentialed for the Republican Convention. As a matter of principle, organizations are better off letting critics inside — it is not like left-leaning blogs will be any MORE critical of the GOP if they are actually at [...]
Update 2: Howling Latina makes a reasonable point. Of course, anybody following thousands of blogs through a site like BNN or LeftyBlogs gets stretched a little thin
Update: Vivian Paige’s response
Here’s Leftyblogs creator Kari Chrisholm’s note to the Virginia blogger who sparked a debate over the delisting [...]
In an effort to avoid being the transmission route for campaign sleaze and other nasty tricks in the months coming up to the election, BNN is not going to add any blogs founded after July 1st, 2008 until after the November election.
Our reasoning is this: We want to be an [...]
Update 2: Leftyblogs says delisting caused by Howling Latina’s lack of local posts.
Update: Maybe it was all a mistake? From the front page of LeftyBlogs: “Status Update: Well, it took longer than expected, but everything is back to working just fine. If your blog has completely disappeared, submit [...]
Is now sort of in Beta form — if anyone with detailed knowledge of their state blogosphere and strong feelings about the influence index would go check yours out: blognetnews.com/ INSERTSTATENAMEHERE /influence-index.php
I’ll try to incorporate any detailed feedback I can get by 9 pm eastern tonight into next weeks index [...]
Mon update: It really was everywhere. Here’s an example in Illinois. I wonder if there is a way to track the number of blogspot blogs that are going to move elsewhere?
Sat update: Of course, we can all complain about Google, but the goofballs at Microsoft and Sitemeter managed to shut [...]
I have no doubt that being crosswise with Virginia’s conservative SWAC Girl would be a pretty irritating experience. Apparently there is a bit of a feud between local newspaper editor J. Todd Foster of the Bristol Herald Courier (owned by the same Media General as our friends at the [...]
BlogNetNews is talking to a couple partners about transforming the BNN search widget and the BNN headline widget into a way for bloggers to make money. The deal would be this: Add a widget to your site which will include both BNN’s functional widget and ad space, at [...]
This is just weird: The newish online strategy of the Examiners is pretty smart: Lure in bloggers to write for them creating local and national content for a share of the advertising pie ($2.50 per 1,000 page views, according to one blog). The odd thing is you apply [...]
Blogs have provided critical support and plenty of heat to help make sure there was enough political will to indict corrupt sleaze Ted Stevens (R-His bank account). Bloggers on the left and the right should be proud of the role they played here.
Now it is up to [...]
Three things I really don’t like in no particular order: Demands that BNN delete links to certain blog posts (read censor), bloggers outing pseudonymous bloggers and silly legal threats. We got the trifecta email last night. It seems this blogger, outed this blogger, so the offended blogger was [...]
Become a pioneer in covering the blogosphere as a news story: BlogNetNews is looking for two or more bloggers to join us for a new slant on campaign coverage. We’re looking for a left-leaning blogger to put aside his or her personal views and cover the role of the left-leaning [...]
We are just starting to play with this ultimately it will likely become a widget that bloggers can put on their sites and part of each state’s main page on BNN.
(If you want to see your state’s just replace virginia in the URL with your state name.)
If you can [...]
Blogging Pols: Politicker Maryland has a couple posts on how Senator Sarbanes is using technology to make himself more available to constituents. Virginia’s attorney general and now gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, has gone as far as scheduling “liveblogs” at different blogs around the state, including blogs of [...]
Help us help you get more attention for your fall election coverage. Too much coverage of the blogosphere focuses on what the national bloggers are saying. We’ve built a portal to put the spotlight on bloggers who know what they are talking about — the ones who are actually there [...]
For the next few months, old BNN feeds will continue to work, but we are in the process of changing over to Feedburner. Each state’s main feed is now available in a format like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/north_carolinaBNN — just switch the state out and you can get yours or look at [...]
Update: Current TV rep B. Marcus denies everything — “We have never purchased those words before. It is against our policy to buy negative key words.” Well, Google … Who did buy them? Now maybe I’ll ask the folks at Human Events and CafePress. More coming.
Update 2: Obama antichrist add [...]
Apparently, few people have noticed, but over the last six months, BNN has been transferring admin authority to local bloggers in the state, local and topical blogospheres we cover. After adding three more last night, 30 sections of BNN are now edited by a local blogger, keeping the sites constantly [...]
Would you pay someone to wander around the Internet asking people who had written disagreeable things about you to take them down? Even if you wouldn’t, if you’re writing tough stuff about the news going on around you, the world of paid personal PR may be about to land in [...]
Big Business badies beat at their own game. It is easy to get the impression that big businesses are a threat to online freedom and the blogosphere after fiascos like the Associated Press Cease and Desist letter to The Drudge Retort. But often a little publicity [...]
Update: Some disagreement from the right side of the Virginia blogosphere.
Ugh, I can’t even believe I am writing this. Sometimes it is hard to tell if this is 2003 or 2008. An editorial in The Roanoke Times* begins with the headline “Bloggers on the take,” and ends [...]
Jack Lail of KnoxNews.com fame asked me last night to write him an email explaining the thinking that went into creating BlogNetNews.com/elections. He posted his take last night.
Here’s the whole email:
This is another way to get at one of the original frustrations that led me to build [...]
Making it easier for readers to find the blog posts they’re interested in, is BNN’s number one job. With that in mind, for the last few months, Tyler Abbott, the technical brains behind BNN, has been hard at work on something that we started unveiling last week and is finally [...]
One of my favorite Pennsylvania bloggers has a post on his theories about gaming the BNN rankings and other BNN controversies. Course, he’s wrong and the rules are about to change anyway, so …
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