Articles about blogs/blogging

Figured I should put a new post up since I don't know if anyone else has something in the works, and this is one of my long days as far as work is concerned. I'll use it to repost a few link that I shared in the comments yesterday.

The Blogfather (in Salon.com)

But then Armstrong, 42, bills himself as a different kind of consultant, an online insurgent who, with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, aka Kos, is leading "a bloodless coup" in national politics. "We are at the beginning of a comprehensive reformation of the Democratic Party -- driven by committed progressive outsiders," Armstrong and Moulitsas write in their recent book, "Crashing the Gate," which sold 5,000 copies online before it was even published. Something is certainly happening. Guest blogging at DailyKos, which gets about 4.5 million page views a week, has become a rite of passage for Democratic bigwigs, people like John Kerry, Russ Feingold, Elizabeth Edwards (under a pseudonym) and Nancy Pelosi. Many of Armstrong's former blogging pupils, who are known by critics as the "Blog Mafia," have been recruited to work for 2006 House and Senate campaigns as varied as those of Connecticut's Ned Lamont, New Jersey's Bob Menendez and Ohio's Sherrod Brown. And next week, roughly 1,000 blog faithful are set to descend on Las Vegas for a four-day conference with the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate, party chairman Howard Dean, and at least three presidential hopefuls.

And the part about Ohio...

The online unity was shattered, however, in October when Sherrod Brown, an outspokenly liberal seven-term congressman from Ohio, announced that he would run for the seat. Armstrong, who had been working as a consultant for Brown, encouraged an online rebellion against Hackett. Before long, Moulitsas and other bloggers had abandoned their once-favorite son, arguing, along with Democratic Party leaders, that Brown was more electable. In one post,, on Oct. 6, Moulitsas wrote, "It might be a good idea for Hackett to stand down." This shocked many readers who had cheered another Kos post just two days earlier, in which Moulitsas seemed to endorse Hackett in a race against Brown. "Give me an Iraq vet over a career politician," he wrote.

"It looked like Jerome and Markos were using their big-box blogs to steamroll into Ohio," said Russell Hughlock, aka Pounder, an electrical engineer who runs the BuckeyeStateBlog. "A lot of people left Kos ... because they got pissed."

Moulitsas told me that both of his posts were, in fact, consistent, and that he had never changed his mind. "One of them spoke from the heart. The other spoke from the brain," he said, explaining that he, reluctantly, concluded Hackett couldn't win the Senate seat. "I would rather have Paul Hackett in the Senate."

The article is duscussed here and here.

On a related note, Plunderbund discusses the ODP's Blog Problem.

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