Remember our landmark interview with Senate President Mike Miller last January? I described a weird scene as nine liberal bloggers, some with pony tails, others with earrings and several in T-shirts were summoned to a rare audience with the most powerful man to never serve as Governor in the history of the state. It was a heady time for the blogosphere. The special session had driven Maryland political blog readership, both on the left and the right, to record levels and the Annapolis leaders had finally recognized our reach.
As far as I know, of the bloggers who participated in that meeting, I am the only one who still posts on a near-daily basis. Almost all of the rest are gone.
The fundamental building blocks of a political movement are not money, slogans, literature pieces or hired consultants. They are IDEAS and the people who generate them. Maryland is not a blue state because of Mike Miller’s personal power or Martin O’Malley’s campaign war chest. It is blue because residents want a stronger economy, quality education, widely available and excellent health care, a clean environment and, above all, social justice. They want to know how we will get there. And that takes creativity, willpower and risk.
We cannot leave these tasks to our politicians. They are ill-suited for them. The vast majority of the state and local politicians I have met are intelligent, possess superior people skills and are individuals of good will. But they are often cautious by nature and tend to balance their beliefs against their electoral needs. They function within a system that encourages incrementalism and seniority and punishes provocateurs. Many of them can and do implement good ideas but few create lots of them. Those people who do are seldom viable candidates for office.
Red Maryland, possibly the most-read political blog in the state, is a seething lava-pit of ideas, criticism, debate and above all hunger. Its contributors are outsiders. They have little access to money, influential officeholders, mainstream media or any of the conventional tools of political power. All they have left are ideas – lots of them. And thousands of their readers share them with their friends and spread their message. This is exactly what William F. Buckley, Paul Weyrich, Milton Friedman and many other conservatives did before the Reagan presidency. This is how to build a movement.
What about the left? We control every political resource in the state and assume that the right will never be competitive. There are many people on our side who would be excellent bloggers. But they are mostly current officeholders, staffers, lobbyists, activists who work within the system or national players. We hear from them by press release, newspaper soundbite, fundraiser speech or often not at all.
In its prime, Maryland’s liberal blogosphere provided an intellectual vigor that kept the Democratic Party in fighting form. With the decline of many liberal blogs, the ideological field of battle has been nearly abandoned to the right. This is complacency at its worst. It is very dangerous for the Maryland Democratic Party and the state’s political left in general. It must be reversed.
So if you are a progressive and have an idea for something better, write it up. Put it on Free State Politics, start your own blog or email it to us at acp1629@hotmail.com. Don’t assume that someone else will come up with it. They probably will not. Maryland’s blogosphere is wide open and thousands of liberals across the state are waiting to hear what your idea is. Ladies and gentlemen, now is an excellent time to blog.
Friday, June 27, 2008
The State of Maryland Blogdom, Part Five
Thursday, June 26, 2008
The State of Maryland Blogdom, Part Four
Political blogs in Maryland really began to roll in 2006, an election year. Back then, a lot of blogs sprang up to cover state and local campaigns, especially in Montgomery County. Remember MoCo Progressive, MoCo Politics, Outside the Beltway, On Background, Sprawling Towards Montgomery, Quid Pro MoCo and the notorious MoCorruption? Most were run anonymously (with Michael Raia's Outside the Beltway the exception) and all offered frequent posts with mostly liberal viewpoints. And now all of them are gone.
Then came the era of Free State Politics. Isaac Smith’s grand experiment set up a common forum in which liberal bloggers from around the state, some open and others anonymous, could post on any state or local issue they wanted. The bloggers fed off each other, shared their experiences in online diaries and elevated the quality of left-wing discourse across the state. Red Maryland, now possibly the state’s most-read political blog, was founded in July 2007 as a counterbalance to Free State Politics.
At its peak last fall, Free State Politics boasted an all-star line-up including Smith, Eric Luedtke, Andrew Kujan, Paul Foer and others, often posting multiple times per day. Free State’s coverage of the special session rivaled the mainstream media, led by Luedtke’s near-daily reporting from Annapolis. Red Maryland bloggers sometimes began their posts by denouncing one of Free State’s contributors (usually Smith or Foer) and much smack-talk was exchanged.
But Red Maryland surpassed Free State in visit count starting in October 2007 and soon had twice as many visits. Luedtke, Kujan and Foer stopped posting and left Smith to battle on alone. Free State has been resurrected in the past and may be revived again, but Red Maryland has won the lead for now.
Like the conservative blogs, the liberal blogs peaked because of the special session and the last general session. MPW, Free State, Bruce Godfrey’s venerable Crablaw and the now-dead MoCo Politics together recorded 8,000-11,000 monthly visits between July and November 2007. Combined visit counts spiked to 21,894 in February before falling to 12,124 last month. That fall is mostly due to Free State’s 66% decline in visits – from 8,892 in February to 3,013 in May. MPW, with 7,320 visits last month, is now the biggest liberal political blog in our dataset.
One blog for which we do not have data is Jim Kennedy’s Vigilance blog. Kennedy is President of Montgomery County’s Teach the Facts group, which advocates for a liberal, open curriculum on gender identity issues in the county’s schools. Kennedy acts as a patient ringmaster in the Chuck Barris mold while dozens of mostly anonymous liberals and conservatives battle it out on everything from nature vs. nurture to the origins of religion. MPW friend Dana Beyer even made news there by announcing her 2010 candidacy for District 18 delegate against a crowded forum of hostile anons. Vigilance must get tons of visits judging from its comment counts but Kennedy seldom strays into non-gender issues.
The decline of the liberal blogs is an important event in the state’s blogosphere. We will discuss the consequences of the left’s fall in Part Five.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
The State of Maryland Blogdom, Part Three
With only two of eight Congressmen, 14 of 47 state senators, 37 of 141 state delegates and no statewide officeholders, Maryland’s Republican Party is in bad shape. That cannot be said of the state’s conservative blogosphere. Right-wing blogs have established a loud, robust, and active online conservative community that eclipses the state’s Republican establishment.
Of the 25 state blogs for which we have collected statistics, twelve are conservative political blogs. Prior to the fall of 2007, these twelve blogs saw a combined 16,000-22,000 visits per month. But the special session and the 2008 general session caused readership to explode to a peak of 39,917 visits in February. Since then, visits have dropped to 30,411 in May – down 24% from the peak, but still much higher than a year ago.
Red Maryland is the most widely-read blog among all those for which we have data. The site had a peak level of 14,614 visits in January before falling to 9,839 visits last month. Red Maryland is a common site shared by 20 conservative bloggers, many of whom cross-post from their own individual blogs. With so many contributors, the site offers multiple posts on many days and acts as a one-stop shopping center for Maryland conservatives. Whether free-state right-wingers want quick-and-dirty Democrat bashing or more detailed critiques of liberal policies, they will find it on Red Maryland.
Other leading conservative blogs include the Baltimore Reporter (4,000-5,000 monthly visits), the often-national issue Pillage Idiot (3,000-5,000 monthly visits) and Howard County (also 3,000-5,000 monthly visits, but declining). No other right-wing blog for which we have data reliably cracks 2,000 visits per month but that is deceiving. Many of these blogs cross-post to Red Maryland and so many readers no doubt receive their content there rather than click on multiple sites.
One important blog for which we do not have data is the infamous O’Malley Watch. There is no policy debate or prescription here: it is pure and endless bashing of the Governor, thrown out as blood-dripping red meat to his legions of enemies. While calling for transparency and open government from O’Malley, the blog’s author hides behind anonymity and does not release visit data. But since the blog’s posts often receive over 100 comments each, mostly from anonymous readers, its visit count must be high. In fact, the venomous O’Malley Watch may be the most-read blog in the state, a sad comment on the politics of the free state’s blogosphere.
In Part Four, we will look at Maryland’s left-wing blogs.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The State of Maryland Blogdom, Part Two
Maryland political blogs generally fall into one of three categories: liberal, conservative or local. Today, we will focus on the local blogs.
Liberal and conservative blogs are self-explanatory. Local blogs tend to cover a specific area, like Baltimore, Silver Spring or Howard County. They are sometimes not directly political in the sense that the author does not have a strong ideological bias. But they often touch on political issues as they apply to a particular local area. The Silver Spring blogs, for example, offered outstanding coverage of last year’s photography dispute on Ellsworth Drive and the recent debate over the Birchmere/Live Nation project.
Of the 25 blogs for which we have obtained visit statistics, nine are local blogs. Of those, Inside Charm City is the most widely-read with a peak of 16,267 visits in April. Inside Charm City is a general news blog reporting on events in and around Baltimore. Jeff Quinton has established himself as perhaps the city’s most prominent blogger since founding the site in April 2007.
Dan Reed’s Just Up the Pike ranks second with a peak of 6,331 visits in April. In a previous post, I proclaimed Dan the “best interviewer in MoCo blogdom.” He is that and more. Dan chronicles often over-looked East County and occasionally branches out to Downtown Silver Spring and Wheaton. Dan is an architectural student and often comments on development-related issues. He is one of a handful of MoCo bloggers who has kept his blog alive since the summer of 2006. Before I started with MPW, I was a guest-blogger on Just Up the Pike and I continue to read it daily.
Rethink College Park wants Maryland’s biggest college town to become “a walkable, inclusive, and dynamic city.” The site peaked at 7,977 visits in December 2007 and now draws around 4,000 visits a month. Authors David Daddio and Rob Goodspeed have a style similar to Dan Reed’s: highly detailed, very local and forward-looking.
The nine blogs for which I have data have grown steadily in visit counts. Prior to the fall of 2007, they drew combined monthly visit counts in the low twenty thousands. Now they are drawing around thirty thousand visits a month. But that understates their influence because I do not have data for some of the most prominent local blogs including the Pocomoke Tattler, Delusional Duck (in Charles County), Salisbury News and most of the other Silver Spring blogs. Silver Spring, serviced by not only Just Up the Pike but no fewer than three other long-running, frequently-updated blogs is probably the blog capital of Maryland.
Local blogs offer a mix of news, opinion, humor and detail that are indispensable supplements to mainstream media (MSM) sources. That is why demand for them is rising steadily and surely. The only constraint to their growth is the time demands on the bloggers themselves. That is an important constraint (as I can testify!) but enough people have overcome it to make this sector of the blogosphere a serious factor in the state’s political scene.
In Part Three, we will cover Maryland’s conservative blogs.
Monday, June 23, 2008
The State of Maryland Blogdom, Part One
Like many MPW readers, I am a heavy consumer of blogs. Yes, I am addicted to information in general. It’s difficult for me to go an entire day without checking the Post, the Sun, the New York Times and several other mainstream media (MSM) sources at least once each. But blogs (at least the good ones) offer something of value beyond the MSM: a fresh take blending fact and opinion from informed, involved observers – and sometimes players – in the scene they cover. Over the last two years, blogs have become an important but largely intangible part of the Maryland political scene. In this five-part series, I present my best shot at measuring the reach of Maryland’s blogs for the first time.
Now there are many, many blogs in Maryland and everywhere else in the world. They range across every interest imaginable: music, art, food, travel, sports, professional issues, medical issues, and on and on. Our focus in this series will be on blogs that relate to Maryland politics. (Hence our name!)
We exclude from our focus “blogs” that are essentially extensions of corporate media outlets. Maryland Moment, a “blog” that often carries short versions of Washington Post stories, is one example. PolitickerMD is another, as we exposed last year. So are the countless other “blogs” run by the Post, the Sun and other MSM sources. While these sites contain useful information often provided by capable professionals, they are for-profit sites controlled by editors and operated for the benefit of corporate entities. That makes them news sites but not truly independent blogs.
Regular readers know that I am a stickler for measurement and that is the biggest challenge for evaluating blogs. How many people read them? Who reads them? How much influence do they have? These are very difficult questions to answer.
Bloggers, and website operators in general, can use a variety of tools to measure traffic on their sites. Most of them identify IP addresses that connect to the site and access its pages. These tools can then aggregate the visit and page view data and report it back to the blog owner. Some blog owners make the aggregate information public while others do not.
The most common traffic measurement tool used by Maryland bloggers is Sitemeter. Sitemeter describes its measures on its website: Sitemeter tracks page views and visits. You may also have heard the term “hits.” When someone comes to your site, they generate a “hit” for every piece of content that is sent to their computer. Viewing a single web site page would generate one hit for the page and one hit for every individual graphics file that was on the page. A single page could easily generate a dozen or more hits. When you are browsing a site, every time you follow a link, it is treated as a single “page view.” Sitemeter defines a “visit” as a series of page views by one person with no more than 30 minutes in between page views.
The definitions of both “visits” and “page views” leave a lot to be desired. Visits are not unique; one user accessing the blog in the morning and the evening would be counted twice. And page views are a better measure of use intensity than the number of users. But the virtue of examining statistics from Sitemeter is that it applies the same imperfect standard to every site it measures. Blog-to-blog comparisons can be made and trends can be determined over time. This is a far more transparent standard than that applied by BlogNetNews, which declines to release its criteria for selecting the “highest influence” blogs on the grounds that they are “proprietary.” Imperfect though it may be, data from Sitemeter may be the best available option for measuring and comparing the state’s blogs.
We collected data from Sitemeter or a comparable service for 25 Maryland blogs related directly or indirectly to state or local politics over the last year. In Part Two, we will begin reporting our results.
