Wednesday, November 23, 2005

The rise of local political blogs

The rise of local political blogs

Just discovered a site called Politics and Technology that should be right up the alley for me and my readers:

"Though readership is tiny for local political blogs, the Nevada Democrats' spokeswoman Kirsten Searer makes the critical point:

'The beauty of bloggers is they have an audience of the right people. If they break news, then insiders in politics and mainstream media are likely to pick it up.'

It is nice to see that the Republicans at the NRCC completely miss the point about blogs. Roll Call quotes spokesman Carl Forti:

'The people who go to these blogs, it’s the very partisan Republicans and very partisan Democrats, and those aren’t the people we are worried about.'

If there's a blog out there - either of the news, commentary, or activist variety - that's talking to your people... well, that's a blog worth tracking and wooing."


The whole article is at Roll Call (which is pay to play and thus rapidly losing influence).

As the hit counter rolls over the 20,000 mark and I evolve back up to Slithering Reptile, I've noticed a definite increase in traffic since I started focusing more on Iowa/Iowa City political items and less on redundant national stuff. And I even got 1) a nibble from one of the statewide campaigns, looking to curry my favor and 2) a nasty, private bashing and baiting from an eminence grise who's allied with another campaign. Curious if my blogging readers have had similar experiences.

And as my three year anniversary of blogging draws near (that's about 118 in dog years), I'm working on resetting my internal censor. I've limited myself somewhat by the use of my real name.

For example, notice how I haven't remarked on the North Liberty situation.

But I've used my real name since I first started using the internet some 15 years ago (ISCABBS, anyone?) and I'm not planning to change now. And I always liked that byline thing back in my journalist days.

Also thinking of shelling out a couple bucks for a real domain name and inviting a guest blogger in the near future.

Very meta for early in the morning. In any case, as Thanksgiving rolls around and my daughter and I prepare to drive north for some Grandma-made turkey, thank for reading. Hope to make it worth your time.

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