We received an email from a friend who obviously wishes us well. We were concerned enough that we spent about three hours composing an answer. Without quoting either the comments or the answer, we will make some observations.
1. The Democrat bloggers are far ahead of us in Colorado. Many of the Democratic bloggers receive stipends from the millionaires. Among themselves, they call themselves "Fellows." It is easy to expect that when they are selected to be "Fellows" they receive the kind of information and training that we are putting here, though not in public. To some degree the folks handing out the fellowships have the power of the purse to keep individual bloggers from hurting the group.
2. The Republican bloggers are all unpaid volunteers. They get no outside training. We provided a traffic metric that we believe is being used by media and other knowledgeable individuals to measure the success of individual bloggers, and by that metric, there is not a single successful Republican blogger in the state. There is no "Hall Monitor" or way for Republican bloggers to get training or understand what they are doing right or wrong and why.
3. It was suggested that the bloggers were concerned at our comments and that the best way to handle comments and criticism was to send individual emails. The problem with individual emails is that this is totally new material and most bloggers aren't used to writing for search engine results. Everyone is making the same mistakes and no one learns from anyone else's mistake. The administrative burden is too great to consider individual emails. We suggested three alternatives and asked the writer to poll the other bloggers as to what they would like. For the next week, we will make no style comments, positive or negative, while we await the results.
4. The writer questioned the advisability of putting the playbook in public. There are certain parts of the playbook that won't be in public. The email reply discussed some of them. The parts that are in public so far are not a state secret. Our guess is that the Democratic Fellows get training in them, so why shouldn't Republican volunteers who are considering starting a blog or joining a blogging group understand from the first essay what they should be doing to hurt Democrats and build their own traffic?
5. A part of our personal playbook is the introduction of paranoia. There are sixty Democrats in the legislature, and a hundred major Democrats throughout the state, in the media, on the courts, etc. Our essays take about three to ten hours to write, depending on the research necessary. We couldn't possibly write even one essay a year on each, but if we can introduce the fear that Democrats who act outrageously might get our attention, and that we know how to impact them, we think there will be much less outrageous behavior, overall. Why not write about that part of the playbook in public? It only increases the paranoia.
6. We did ask bloggers to send us their email addresses. There are parts of the playbook that require cooperation and coordination.
7. Ah, that word-cooperation. We Republican bloggers do not cooperate enough. We made some suggestions as to how and why that should change. We will add to it here. Our common goal should be to meet the metric described above regardless of which Republican candidate we support at primary time. Our observations suggest that it is in everyone's interest to link each other and some of each other's pages regardless of political leanings (conservative or moderate). Folks who follow links seldom go anywhere but to the linked essay. By the way, that's why putting part of the playbook in the open is not that dangerous as few will see it.
8. A question was asked about team blogging. We didn't address that as well as we should have. We strongly encourage team blogging. Everyone has a life, a need to go to weddings, on vacations, out to dinner with the spouse, or to a ball game with the grandkids. If you look at the most successful blogs, they are all team blogs. Successful blogs publish day in and day out.
Finally (on this topic), we will observe that we do not have all the answers, or even that the answers we have are right. There is no Republican class for bloggers. There are seminars, but we have never attended. All of our suggestions are from experimentation and observation. When we use a search engine and run across our own essay, we try to figure out what has happened. On our other blog, we try to trace the activities of every visitor. If you do that, you can sometimes deduce the positive impact of paranoia and you learn a lot. Following search engine entries back to look at the parameters used is a good exercise as well.
Other topics. Someone left us an essay without asking as a comment at the bottom of this entry. It is a good essay, quite professionally written, but it has a national, rather than a Colorado theme, so is not really appropriate to this blog. We would very much like to see the author involved in blogging somewhere and would like his address (Team Building). We ask that people not leave extraneous material as comments to posts as they become search engine fodder.
Talk about Paranoia! The newspapers are paranoid of the judiciary. The essay we wrote yesterday on Corruption would never be published in a physical newspaper which is why the judiciary thinks it can get away with anything. On one of last night's talk shows, a reporter for a major paper very gingerly suggested that "someone should look into this." The fear was obvious in both his manner and his choice of words. It would be funny if it weren't sad and scary.
By pure accident, tomorrow's essay will be on the chairman of the Colorado house committee that should be supervising this mess. We sent him a few questions on Wednesday and one last night, but haven't heard from him.
Jim C comments on the Corruption essay: I'm not a lawyer, and know little to nothing about the law... but, wouldn't you get into jurisdictional issues with appointing an out of state special prosecutor?
We're not lawyers either, but it is routine for out of state lawyers to receive permission from the Supreme Court to practice in a limited way-a lawsuit or two-and this is a permission that the Supreme Court would be reluctant to refuse out of fear of impeachment.
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