the greatest lesson i took out of it was that we need to do a better job encouraging the medium/smaller blogs.  our successes have come from the larger ones grabbing on to something and not letting go.  but we have yet to tap to even close to its potential the more local blogs.  even i am guilty of that on my own personal blog.  i only link to the big guys and rarely seek out the smaller ones to get my information from.

hey Chris, should there be traffic in the Appendix IV for traffic on the Dem Institution blogs?  looks like an empty column to me.

Does it make sense to compare traffic at a Daily Kos and MyDD style site and other standalone blogs?  DK and MyDD have a lot of self generated traffic to individual diaries, which could be considered separate blogs.

In question is how many targeted states have been selected by the GOP and in which elctions? What were the results?

Florida and Ohio were each targeted and each had massive fraud committed by the GOP criminals. Are there others?

Is the public announcements by GOP about a state being targeted just a cover for their criminal activities? Is it a signal for the dirty tricks and criminals to move into that state operations?

Can anybody look inot this in more detail?

I think there are more "smaller" conservative blogs because FR has been around longer. Although it is the largest, the Free Republic does not share the views of most conservatives.  Redstate and Powerline are "inventions" to try to put on a more "diplomatic" face to the conservative online community.

Beacuse it has been aroung longer that has been more time to "splinter-off" of Free Republic. I am sure that many of the more established smaller conservative blogs creators were once members of free republic. The key here is that the freerepublic has created a momentum and a presence on the net that keeps the  hits "up".

I think it is a HUGE mistake to corrallate number of the hits with ideology. I think the most accurate you can get is one blog is conservative and the other is "progressive".

Why this is a mistake because as for DailyKos... I think Kos and Armando are absolute rubbish but there are still some very good diarist that I like to read and I still visit every day. It is like tolerating Brooks and Kristof in the New York Times just so you can read Thomas Friedman, Bob Herbert, Frank Rich and Paul Krugman.

Also, because of the large readership there is a "common" knowledgebase with others in the blogosphere... for example most people know about the "Pie Wars"... and everyone has read or heard of Kos's latest rant on NARAL... that does not mean that every shares his stupid ideology... just that the majority in the progressive blogoshpere has heard about it. I have read several smaller blogs that disagree completly.

Why is this important, because I think there is a corralation between discontent with dailyKos and the sprouting of smaller blogs on the progressive side because ...

Kos just doesn't "do it" for everyone anymore. There used to be a real communal feeling during the elections that you just had to camp out on Daily Kos to get "the news"... now that they fucked that up... people are much more willing to venture outside it's borders.

There was a time that I could get all my news from Kos... not anymore... and the range of blogs I am reading now are much more diverse than I read before. I see more and more blogs popping up and more importantly more and more people READING them. Before, if you weren't diarying on Kos no one would read you... at least I didn't.

One of the BIG MISTAKES I see happening is that the "forces that be" are mistaking Kos's larger readership as a corralation that people "agree" with Kos's ideology... I think that is a false assumption particularly in light of recent bannings and pummelings from the "help"... people are just not speaking up.

Forcing ideologies down the throats of the DKos readership will be it's downfall if he does not take care. The only thing he can be certain of at this time is that his readers are "progressive" Kos is swinging in the dark if he wants to push his readership into some narrowly defined ideology defined by a "think tank". He ain't that good.

Certainly DK hits spiked during that lastest NARAL rant but I am sure half of the people "tuned in" to see Kos make a fool of himself. So do not assume that hits equal agreement of ideology... I sometimes even look in at the Zoo on Free Republic. Like I said even the NYT has Kristof and Krugman in the same rag... it is only the wingnut noise machine that has "made" the NYTs "librul" newspaper...

However, this "tightening of controls and command" on Daily Kos has had a net positive effect of more blogs "splintering off".

I have to read the whole thing and will come back to it, but what I have scanned so far reads really well.

SMOOCHIEROOS,
liza

Ahem!

Good stuff. How do we get the snowball rolling faster?

I'm not a blogger, just a visitor to blogs who is interested in seeing them become a more cooperative and powerful force. Did NPI pressrelease this out to the blogs?

You will need to get someone else to recover my predictably progressive vote in a red state, so you are down one right now, guys.

Actually, I am amazed that I was finally able to be pushed over the edge by someone's arrogance.

But I've had it with you for good.

One thing that I'd like to see more discussion on is the tone of different blogs.

Most of the blogs have a very stark partisan tone to them that preaches to the choir at the same time as it turns off opponents. They end up creating this virtual war that has no relationship to how most people see things. While I think that there is nothing wrong with that, since it energizes the base, I do think that we need to acknowledge that it is what it is.

I think that there's a lot of room in the blogosphere for sites that work on reaching out to people including Republicans. That's been one of the goals of my site. Calling Bush a stupid, out of touch idiot may get you lots of hits but it doesn't help you in convincing Republicans to vote with you.

It's really not a reasonable comparison, though.  DU is primarily a discussion forum, whereas DK is primarily a blog.  Consequently, the average DU user generates a great many more page views than the average DK user.  That's because they're simply different types of websites.

Also, the user interface of DK leads it to have lower page views than DU.  DK has things like DHTML comment nesting, meaning that I can browse around several hundred posts and dozens of threads attached to a single story, all as one "page view."  Doing this on DU would require dozens of page views.

I'm not saying that one approach is better than the other, just that "page views" aren't a great metric.  In general, less page views makes for lower server load -- DK's work to reduce their server load via reducing page views has depressed their figures.  If DU has any such concerns, I'm not familiar with them.

Both may be blogs in the sense that they post frequent, short, essays by one or a limited group of authors. From a political action point of view, however, they can serve different functions.

If a site is just an online mechanism for the posting of essays it is more like a magazine than a truly web-based service. It can serve the purpose of re-energizing the readers and help get talking points across, but that is the limit.

A site that permits a dialog (like this one) should really be called an online forum. Not only can it perform the same functions as above, but it also allows for more participation and the generation of new ideas from the public at large.

There is nothing better than getting people involved in a continuing dialog to keep their interest up. That's why face-to-face canvassing at election time is so effective. Just the fact that someone is listening to the voter has a postitive effect on their choice of candidate.

Many of the conservative sites fall into the first category and it is my guess that they are less effective because of it. Some other measure might be needed besides page hits to gauge this, however.

I think lefty sites should continue with the forum model. See the transition from Talking Points Memo to TPMCafe as an example.

(BTW, if you wanted details about The Sideshow, all ya had to do is ask.)

One thing I'd ask you to change. You use the term "blogosphere" without capitalizing it. I think we've arrived enough to have the right to be as capitalized as "Internet."

Once again, great work Chris and Matt. See what happens when a hard working guy gets a laptop?