Heard on the Tin Can Telephone The telephone says that there will be a major announcement by a Colorado Senate candidate tomorrow. That news so surprised us that we broke the string! More after we find a new string.
Yesterday's Behaving Badly essay took about seven hours to write, mostly on Saturday. While it is true that blog readership drops on weekends, there are ways to change that.
It isn't an accident that we publish the hardest hitting essay we can write on Sunday. If Republicans discover that the series exists and come to like it, we think that many will develop a habit of coming here Sunday evening to see which Democrat got skewered, and how. If we can get them here, they will migrate to the Sunday sweep blogs.
If that strategy is to work, there has to be meat in the Sunday sweep. You can be the judge as to whether that happened this week. If bloggers don't want to write on Sunday, then they might consider writing on Friday and spreading their publishing efforts out through the weekend.
The Blank Post. There isn't much mysterious about the blank page we created earlier this weekend. We think every blogger should have one.
Blank posts are very good for link storage. For example, when we were writing the Behaving Badly essay this week, we recalled that there were two recent stories that would have easily supported it. One was the $65 million story which we used. The other was one we couldn't find but would have fit right in. It was the story on the Democrats playing budget games in violation of the Constitution to avoid putting money into highways.
Some of the seven hours we spent on the Behaving Badly essay was spent in a fruitless search for that article. That's where blank posts come in. When we see an article that we think might be useful in the future, we can put a link to it there with a small descriptor. It's not as good as having Lexus-Nexus, but it is better than losing track of a useful article.
Because blog software is sequential and because it is a pain to go back hundreds of posts to find the blank post to edit and add a new link, readers can expect to see about one new blank post every 100 posts. We will let them sink out of sight before we use them.
There is nothing sinister about them. We will make it easy for those who want to watch them by creating a separate category for them. That also makes it easy for us to find them.
Current Project. We are trying to write a series of essays on the state of Colorado blogging. Ideally, that series won't be published here, at least initially.
We've become sensitized to the sensitivity of some bloggers to what they view as criticism, and that is making the writing this series so much harder that it should be.
In Colorado, we Republican bloggers do what we do as volunteers. Not the Democrats. If Democrat bloggers wish to become "Fellows," they get a $1500/month stipend, coaching from a CU professor, formal training, access to Lexus-Nexus. In return, they are expected to do original reporting and publish three posts a day on average. They are also required to show that they have had an impact. Currently, there are seven "Fellows," but more are being recruited.
It shouldn't be surprising to anyone who looks at this asymmetrical situation that every day in Colorado the Harlem Globetrotters make fools of the efforts of our little local pick up team. On average, they put out 21 blog posts a day, seven days a week. And that's just one blog. We think there are more.
Perhaps an essay series like that might land in the hands of folks who can do something about the funding disparity.
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