I can’t say that I spend much time thinking about Conservapedia, the creationist wiki created as a counterpoint to Wikipedia, but today I happened to find myself on the page titled “Examples of Bias in Wikipedia“. As you might expect, it’s a fun one. The [...]
Considering that I work in online marketing, I should be a lot better at marketing myself online. Instead, here is a two-week-old video from the 7 o’clock news of CBS’s Washington, D.C. affiliate interviewing one William Beutler for a segment about anonymity online, as inspired by the recent lawsuit [...]
To say that many people do not like TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is some understatement. Anyone who can get the normally laid-back Leo Laporte to start cursing and shut down a broadcast has some kind of unique skills of irritation. (See also: [...]
On Saturday the 25th I received a notification in my inbox that a new Twitter account had started following mine, something that happens at least a half-dozen times daily. As Twitter has understandably never been able to completely rid itself of its spam problem, many of these are [...]
Before this gets any more stale, I should get around to posting video of my most recent appearance on Bloggingheads.tv, the first in a few months now:
This was posted on Friday afternoon but recorded on Thursday at about 5:30 p.m. — just as news was breaking worldwide [...]
Cross-posted from The Wikipedian.
The Democratic Party of Virginia settled on a nominee for governor this past week, choosing state senator Creigh Deeds over two better-known rivals, including former DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe. (On the Republican side, Bob McDonnell was unopposed for the nomination.) Following the race, Virginia blogger [...]
Over the weekend, I followed a Google text ad in my Gmail inbox (the modern equivalent of “surfing the ‘net”) to a website calling itself Not Robin Hood, attacking the integrity of campaign software vendor NGP. At contention is NGP’s claim that it provides its services exclusively to [...]
Matt Bai, whose book The Argument offered invaluable reporting and insight about the rise of progressive online activism this decade, has a skeptical take on Twitter in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Following a tenuous comparison to ex-Sen. Bob Graham’s infamous, meticulous journaling and a swipe [...]
Is Sen. Richard Shelby following you on Twitter? He is — or should I say, his staff — started following me about a week ago. They’re following 700+ other accounts, and 500+ are following back.
But here’s why I even bring it up:
Any plans to tweet, [...]
My post from Sunday, Everyone an Instapundit: How the Left Underestimates Twitter, drew a strong reaction both on Twitter and in the comment section. As one might expect in the starkly polarized political blogosphere, reaction was split. I can’t complain that it stimulated so much discussion, but there [...]
I’ve noticed a trend over the past few weeks, roughly concurrent with the Twitter-reinforced Tea Party movement, which is a tendency on the Left to dismiss Twitter both for its apparent limitations as well as its embrace by the political Right. Not only do I think they are making [...]
Late yesterday afternoon — following news that crew members of the U.S. ship seized by Somali pirates had retaken the vessel — friend of Blog P.I. Josh Treviño tweeted the following:
Twenty minutes later, Treviño received a call from a producer at ABC News’ [...]
I know that Barack Obama and Ron Paul were very popular on Digg during the last electoral cycle, but the thing about that, you know… it was the last cycle:
And what’s this, just one story in the category right now? C’mon, Digg. [...]
My NMS colleague Simon Owens’ latest PBS MediaShift column takes on the state of online political advertising in the “double whammy” for bloggers and ad brokers in an off-year for politics that happens to be occurring in the middle of a recession. Here he talks to Henry Copeland, founder [...]
Practicing Politics in the Twitter Era: If we are to speak of the age of online politics — and I am not certain that we should — let’s say we’ve lived through the Blog Era (2001-04), the YouTube Era (2005-08) and now we are in the Twitter Era (2008-?). This [...]
Note: Cross-posted from The Wikipedian.
You may have heard of Earth Hour, an eco-Hallmark holiday for the Twitter age, created by the World Wildlife Fund in 2007 and promoted in the media each year since.
You are probably less likely to have heard of [...]
To be fair, Jake DeSantis has bigger things on his mind right now: His resignation letter was published in the New York Times yesterday, kicking off a day’s worth of appraisals across the blogosphere.
Despite the flurry of debate and impressive spike in mentions of his name, [...]
It’s the busy season for Internet conferences, with SXSWi recently concluded,* Personal Democracy Forum just ahead and the District’s own PoliticsOnline annual conference sponsored by the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) at George Washington University. I was a panelist once during my time writing [...]
Clicking around ye olde Internets this afternoon, I stumbled across this Google ad on the repost blog of a colleague who was once the subject of a post on this site:
Can’t say I’d heard of SodaHead before, but it turns out to be:
a [...]While the New York Times didn’t pick the conservative blogger I had recommended to replace the embarrassing Bill Kristol on their op-ed page, they actually chose a conservative blogger — to say nothing of hiring someone my own age. Marc Ambinder reports:
Ross Douthat’s New PerchFriday marked the one week anniversary of the death of the Rocky Mountain News, a newspaper I never read in a state I have never visited. On the other end of the media spectrum, the recently-launched The New Ledger featured a relevant rumination by Francis Cianfrocca this week, [...]
I’m working on a project to post here tonight or tomorrow, and this project involved Googling the phrase united states senate. (Try it, it’s fun! OK, not that much.) As you might expect, here’s the top result:
Notice anything? How about the Google Sitelinks (if [...]
Via Jeff Emanuel at RedState, this one needs no explanation:
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 [...]
Memeorandum is very, very, very good at (mostly) algorithm-based news discovery and organization, which is why it’s arguably notable (even when it arguably is not) when something goes wrong:
One doesn’t need to click through to know the title of that post is not [...]
All of a sudden, I think I maybe know why President Obama abandoned his Twitter account.
To wit, it’s been a rough day for the Obama administration — and I’m not just referring to former Dallas mayor and U.S. trade representative-designate Ron Kirk’s tax issues — I refer also [...]
In an ideal world, this post would have gone up during the week, but this one will have to do: Later today, I’m presenting at TransparencyCamp, sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation and iStrategy Labs. More than that even, Blog P.I. is an official [...]
Before I started working for The Hotline (and before they had a web presence to speak of) the original Beltway tip sheet had a catch phrase: “The word on the street is ours.” This week it looks like they’re going back to the well as they roll out a new [...]
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 [...]
Some events come as a shock to the system, even as they don’t especially surprise. (Wait, that’s how I began yesterday’s post. Well, this one also mentions Josh Treviño, and here at Blog P.I. we are all about serendipity.) The shuttering of Culture11, billed [...]
Some events come as a shock to the system, even as they don’t especially surprise. Bill Kristol’s unceremonious sacking — “This is William Kristol’s last column.” — was such an event. Sure, Memeorandum filled up with commentary in the 24 hours after said last column was published, but [...]
Four years ago when I was writing for The Hotline, I both had to work on Inauguration Day and also got out early to try attending the event itself. This year I did neither, thanks to no longer having to write against a daily deadline (while this post may [...]
The buzz-elect is all about Barack Obama’s various meetings with various groups of Beltway intellectuals in the past 24 hours: Last night he dined with conservative writers at George Will’s house, and today he met with the liberals. Here’s the post as it headlined Marc Ambinder’s blog [...]
I don’t know if most readers here would think that Wikipedia’s best-covered politician and Google’s best-listed website are all that similar, but I don’t think you can write it off entirely.
My reason for thinking so began after Mickey Kaus checked his e-mail inbox late last week, [...]
Forty-eight hours after the big meltdown, the blogs of SoapBlox are far from dead. In fact, of the sites Blog P.I. reported being offline on Wednesday morning, all are back online, archives seemingly intact.
As it turns out, the only website that seems any different is [...]
SoapBlox is one of the more important but less heralded platforms in the progressive blogosphere’s infrastructure. Or, it was. If you visit the main SoapBlox website today, you will see this post at the very top:
SoapBlox is Dead
by: pacified
January 07, 2009 at 08:15:46 MST
[...]
As TechCrunch reported this morning, someone has been hacking into high-profile Twitter accounts and posting amusingly defamatory tweets. But here’s one they missed:
This tweet stayed up longer than the others. I learned about it just after noon today (hat tip: Brad Levinson) and [...]
Note: Updated below.
If you haven’t read this morning’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by Paul Mulshine of the Newark Star-Ledger, “All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper”, it’s just the kind of arrogant-clueless screed by a newspaperman against the blogosphere that elicits first anger, then pity.
These opinion columns [...]
It’s been awhile since there’s been a good, old fashioned “you can’t do that in the blogosphere” controversy, but this morning Memeorandum brings us one in the form of a public rebuke to nomadic Center for American Progress (CAP) blogger Matthew Yglesias by CAP interim chief executive [...]
There’s been plenty of discussion over the past couple days about Huffington Post’s habit of posting articles that consist of the first few paragraphs of someone else’s story sans commentary and then linking to the full piece. This was first raised by Whet Moser at the Chicago Reader, [...]
Twitter experienced another milestone last week, although you may not have noticed: Tweet for Chuck, a fundraising drive organized by the nascent campaign of Chuck DeVore, a California state assemblyman who is gearing up to take on Barbara Boxer in 2010. As far as I [...]
The word “fisking” — originating in the blogosphere ca. 2001 — has fallen somewhat into disuse in recent years, especially as the ’sphere has expanded to include many who weren’t around back in its earliest days.
For the uninitiated, it refers to a point-by-point refutation of an odious [...]
You may not have noticed this, but the most-followed user account on Twitter has not been updated in nearly a month:
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to check, except that it was mentioned on the latest episode of This Week in Tech (where they are [...]
On Thursday afternoon, I recorded my latest guest spot on Bloggingheads with Bill Scher. I pretty strenuously object to the argument he puts forth — that America necessarily voted for a progressive approach to government last Tuesday — I certainly didn’t persuade him, but will I persuade you? I [...]
Well folks, this is it. After two years of the longest presidential campaign ever — and one hopes it can’t get any longer — the polls are open and people are standing in line all across America. Or, given the early hour, all across the Eastern time zone. And this [...]
All irritation at being notified of new comment spam is equal, but the amusements to be found in some spams are more equal than others:
The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per [...]
In March, I published a long, essayish post titled “What’s the Matter with Conservative Journalism?” Among numerous lamentations about the right’s inability to produce serious journalism and serious journalists, I wrote:
The liberal tilt of mainstream newspapers and magazines certainly has something to do with the professional networks within [...]
Slate redesigned its website this weekend. Unlike the dramatic redesign in 2006 or the reconstructive surgery performed on The Atlantic (magazine and website) this past month, the 14-year-old news commentary “magazine” went under for nothing more than a facelift: the logo remains the same while the site has [...]
We’re now in the final thirty days of an election cycle that began nearly two years ago, and while many think they already know how it will end, no partisan operative can afford to think that way. What happens in the next four weeks will determine the outcome of [...]
At this point it looks like my ability to update Blog P.I. in anything like a consistent manner will be greatly limited until after the conclusion of the presidential election. It was like this last year during the Fred Thompson campaign and, more recently, in the run-up to the party [...]
Well, I didn’t plan to disappear from blogging for a week, but sometimes that happens. Not that I was entirely absent from the blogosphere last week: among other activities related to blogging, I recorded my latest segment for Bloggingheads, this time not with Bill Scher but with Sara Robinson [...]
One of the best homebrew Wikipedia tools around is the Wikipedia article traffic statistics tool maintained by a young Swede who goes by the name Henrik on Wikipedia. At least it was, until Henrik announced he was going on vacation in July and the statistics fell into quick [...]
Note: Stephen Ewen responds; see the end of this post.
If you’re like me, you’re a member of Barack Obama’s social network my.barackobama.com mostly for informational purposes. That is, to see what they’re saying. Today on a semi-public (anyone is free to join) listserv associated with a group called “Obama [...]
I’m finally inside the restricted zone in St. Paul and sitting down at the C-SPAN work area in the Wilkins Auditorium press filing center (adjacent to the Xcel Energy Center) to get some actual work in. Barring any pressing need to write something longer than 140 characters, this will [...]
The image above was taken about five minutes before descending into cellular service to find five copies of the same press release in my inbox saying that most convention activities have been suspended (at least tomorrow) in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav.
And to think, [...]
I don’t write about clients often. When I do it’s really something, and this is really something: New Media Strategies will be working through the conventions with C-SPAN, perhaps my favorite Beltway news organization, to run their Convention Hub. [...]
As frequent readers of political blogs undoubtedly know, famous-for-DC blogger Matt Yglesias recently gave up the job of many others’ lifetimes, blogging for The Atlantic, to write the same typically eponymous blog he has posted to more or less daily since 2002, now for the Center for American Progress [...]
Taegan Goddard is getting a lot of attention from the leftosphere right now for posting allegations that John McCain’s campaign lifted text from the Wikipedia article about Georgia (the nation-state, not the U.S. state). But as a writer and former professional journalist, I know from plagiarism, and [...]
Late last week I made my third appearance on Bloggingheads.tv with Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis; we talked about the politics of Twitter, whether #dontgo is a genuine movement or not, whether Obama is underperforming or overperforming, how to understand the different types of voters, why [...]
Hey, I’m as big a fan of Chuck Todd as anyone*, and the Viva Chuck Todd blog from Cerebral Itch is inspired:
Especially the e-mail interviews with his grandmother in Florida. But now this is really getting out of hand:
I enjoy joke Twitter accounts as much as the next person. However, if you’re going to do one, you must be extra careful in keeping the account separate from your main account, which is why I also feel compelled to share the occasional cautionary tale.
Here’s one from today, noticed [...]
The Politico is produced just a couple floors below the office whence I type these words, and its staff has counted more than a few of my fellow former Hotline colleagues. Heck, I’ve got two of their promotional coffee mugs in [...]
Considering that my last two posts were more or less about non-coverage of the John Edwards kerfuffle and highly active Wikipedia articles, I can’t believe I’ve so far missed out on the controversy over what to do [...]
This week’s edition presents something of a dilemma. As the title of this latest installment indicates, several articles related to the “The Dark Knight” and Batman universe show up in this week’s list of the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia.
The problem is, you see, I haven’t actually seen [...]
Today, the Times of London reports on the John Edwards sex scandal and the awkward non-coverage here in the states, and it includes at least one sentence that will be very amusing to the L.A. blogosphere:
Tony Pierce, editor of the Los Angeles Times, issued an edict to the paper’s [...]
Three is a trend in journalism, but two is all Blog P.I. needs, as completely separate but nevertheless intriguing comparisons of George W. Bush with Bruce Wayne (and vice versa) have been flying all across the Internets the last few [...]
While we’re running Twitter mentions of political blog conferences through Flaptor’s Twist, here’s Netroots Nation (#nn08) this weekend with Personal Democracy Forum (#pdf2008) two fortnights ago:
Even at one day fewer (two if [...]
This past weekend, Austin hosted two conferences devoted to political blogging: the widely covered and heavily-attended liberal Netroots Nation (née Yearly Kos) and the brand new and under-the-radar conservative Right Online (at which I spoke on Friday).
Both conferences designated hashtags for attendees to use when tweeting their [...]
Two previous topics at Blog P.I. have been newspaper journalists’ tendency to hold the word “netroots” at arms length, and the extent to which Robert Novak, so old he built the school, “gets” the Internet.
Novak’s column in this morning’s Post, about Barack Obama’s current overseas travel, affords [...]
The Google Adwords “buy your rivals” strategy can be a very effective way of putting your message in front of Internet users who wouldn’t necessarily think about your brand, product, service, candidate, issue, argument, party, or even your party’s nominating convention.
So let’s try Googling the major party political [...]
On Saturday, John Fund wrote a story in which he inadvertently referred to a certain well-known political blogger as:
…Ed Morrissey of the conservative blog Captain’s Quarters…
This prompted Morrissey to joke:
I’ll have to get John to update his Rolodex.
On Saturday, a Los Angeles Times op-ed by George [...]
For no reasons other than my own demonstrated affinity for the works of David Foster Wallace and recent fixation with the alleged pseudonymous works of Mike Murphy, I would like to present an excerpt of a limited panel strip drawn in 2005 by webcomic artist Mike Russell1.
The [...]
This week marks the one-year anniversary for Open Left, a spinoff of the original netroots blog, MyDD. As far as I can tell, the date was not observed on the site itself, but then Chris Bowers, Matt Stoller and the rest are busy running a political website. Blog P.I. [...]
I don’t know why, but since last night, the American Spectator’s website at spectator.org has been blocked for being a “reported attack site”:
Fortunately, perhaps, Google provides diagnostic tools for those curious about where the site has gone:
In today’s New York Times, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol asks:
So Where’s Murphy?
That is to say, why has former McCain strategist Mike Murphy not yet joined John McCain’s presidential campaign? Because Kristol is talking about it, it seems like everyone else is talking about it, but nobody is [...]
All the Rage is taking a week off due to my own busy schedule and the fact that, when I arrived back in town late last night from spending the July 4th holiday in Ohio, I found the list at Wikirage to be somewhat underwhelming.
For the record, [...]
It’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed Fight the Smears microsite. It’s certainly a daring move, and probably the right one. Although a cardinal rule of politics has long been “don’t repeat the charges [...]
The biggest news in the District’s blogging circles yesterday had nothing to do with John McCain’s campaign shakeup or Barack Obama’s rhetorical shift centerward but the inexplicable shooting of one of liberal blogging’s up-and-comers, Brian Beutler.
Early in the day I’d seen Dave Weigel’s IM message reading “Brian Beutler [...]
At last week’s Personal Democracy Forum, one of the events I missed was the launch of a coalition called InternetforEveryone.org. I’m skeptical of the organization, and while I admit I’m not really sure what it’s all about, therein lies part of my skepticism. It’s very easy to agree that [...]
It’s an article of faith among among Democrats that John Kerry, a war hero, was unduly smeared by a group of fellow veterans who did not know him or his accomplishments. I took more a mixed view of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, finding some of their claims worthy [...]
This weekend I made my second appearance on Bloggingheads.tv’s “The Week in Blog” series opposite Bill Scher. I got the call sort of last-minute, so I wasn’t nearly as prepared this time as my first [...]
If it’s true that today’s District v. Heller ruling is the first time in U.S. history that the Supreme Court has has directly ruled on the meaning of the Second Amendment, it also seems likely to be the last. The battle has carried on for decades in lower courts, [...]
My last post, written from an auditorium on the fifth floor of the AOL Time Warner Center, was a little on the snarky side about the fact that two weeks after the formal suspension of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, she is still sending e-mails to her massive list.
[...]
As I’m sitting here in the Rose Theater at PDF, working on a longer post about the day’s cacophony, what arrives in my inbox but this:
This is the second e-mail I’ve received from “Hillary for President” since she announced her [...]
I spent most of Sunday traveling to New York City for Personal Democracy Forum, so I am filing this week’s edition from the auditorium. This means I’ll have to keep it short, including this intro:
This submission to Digg from Daily Kos “went popular” today, which is to say it made the front page:
So it wasn’t “buried” per se, in that the story has not (as of about 8:00 p.m. Thursday) been demoted from the front page, and [...]
Although All the Rage exists as a feature for the purposes of examining the top 10 most-edited articles on the English-language Wikipedia for the week ending Saturday, sometimes it’s almost more interesting what doesn’t make the list. Today we’ll do both:
Two e-mails landed in my Gmail inbox late last night, the first from the McCain campaign and the second from Obama’s team. Notice the order and the subject matter:
In case your eyes are as bad as mine (or you aren’t using Firefox [...]
Charles Krauthammer is one of the country’s most influential conservative thinkers, indeed one of the country’s most influential newspaper columnists. Right?
When I was on Bloggingheads a few weeks ago, I briefly mentioned a then-recent Krauthammer column that caught my attention and made me think hard about current U.S. [...]
A look at the top 10 most-edited articles on the English-language Wikipedia from May 26 through June 1, according to the handy Wikirage edit-monitoring online tool.
Of course not. I certainly haven’t. I’m willing to put a good sum on the wager that no one I know has ever read one of her opinion columns. And I’d even bet that no more than two commenters will appear on [...]
In the past week or so, two online GOP operatives (neither of whom is David All) have separately suggested to me that the competition among the three Republican Internet fundraising websites is effectively over. Even I doubted the separation would happen this quickly, but as of now even [...]
I’m no fan of oversimplifying the decision-making process that guides news coverage or promotion thereof, let alone promulgating conspiracy theories, but I have to ask about this:
Why wasn’t Michael Isikoff’s investigative piece outlining the lobbying connections of Barack Obama’s [...]
For the record, this page will not be covering Flavor of Love (season 3), Deaths in 2008, 2008 UEFA Champions League Final or a handful of other articles that may have made the top-edited list but for the fact that I’m not entirely sure whether I copied the [...]
Our periodic look at the top ten most-edited articles on the English language Wikipedia, made possible Craig Wood’s ![Google diagnostics <a href="http://www.blognetnews.com/newsinnovation/go.php?http://www.blogpi.net/expecting-the-spectator" class="postLink" target="_blank">[...]</a> </div>
<div class="postoptions">
<div class="postoptions_links"><a href="javascript:document.getElementById(](http://www.blogpi.net/wp-content/uploads/spectator-google-diagnostics.jpg)
Share | 
Article: 
Article: 