A few days ago, I received an e-mail from a delighted progressive activist who informed me that she'd just stumbled onto our flagship website,
Pacific Northwest Portal, for the first time.
She'd been looking for more information on the local Republican Party's attempt to disenfranchise thousands of voters by challenging their registrations (more about that here).
She was vaguely aware of the existence of an online progressive community, but had no idea we had a such a strong regional, or local, blogging scene.
She was amazed in particular at how many blogs that we have listed (and linked!) in our Regional Blogs directory, and wanted to know: "How on earth did you find all of these different blogs?"
As I contemplated my answer to her question, I thought I might as well offer my explanation about how we've been connecting the dots in the progressive blogosphere to the whole Daily Kos community.
Read on to learn more....
For those of you who do not know, Pacific Northwest Portal was conceptualized and launched about eleven months ago, in late January of 2005.
At the time, the political climate in Washington State was somewhat acidic, with the Republicans attempting to challenge the election of Governor Christine Gregoire, who had just been inaugurated.
The Republicans were on a media blitz, out to convince voters that Democrats had been stuffing ballot boxes and cheating in order to ensure that Gregoire was knocked out or seriously damaged. They were making a lot of noise and generating a lot of hype. (See a timeline of events that occurred in the gubernatorial election challenge here.)
The Republicans had their talk radio hosts...but they also had something else: a strong web presence, thanks largely to the conservative megablog Sound Politics (There were a few other sites, but Sound Politics had the most writers and it was the most influential).
This presented a worrisome problem: the other side was more united and interconnected than we were. How could this problem be addressed?
I was taking a walk about eleven months ago (January of 2005) while pondering this question, and searching for answers. I'd had conversations with a couple of other bloggers prior to my walk which had got me thinking.
Finally, I realized what we needed: a new website which would act as a media and information gateway. This gateway would also provide easy (and critical) access to progressive bloggers throughout the region, along with some coverage of the mainstream media.
Thus Pacific Northwest Portal was born. Since its inception, it has helped unite and link the progressive blogosphere together.
With the recent release of our Late November Update, the Portal's Regional Blogs Directory includes 214 different progressive blogs from four states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska.
Which takes us right back to that question I referenced earlier: "How on earth did you find all of these different blogs?"
When Pacific Northwest Portal was first founded, its blog listings weren't very long. In fact, when we were building the initial version of the site, we started combing through the blogrolls of the few progressive local blogs we knew of at the time to find new blogs. We also looked through the existing Daily Kos reader blogs page (as you know, a number of Kossacks, including myself, are working on a project to update the reader blogs page).
Ultimately, we premiered the site with a list that included between two to three dozen local blogs.
The premiere of Pacific Northwest Portal was announced in several places...most notably here, at Daily Kos. The same day we debuted, we received e-mails or comments from unlisted Northwest bloggers who wanted to join the directory. So, just hours after our launch, we had already accumulated a list of new blogs that we needed to add.
We had some help as we started growing. David Neiwert, who blogs at Orcinus, was instrumental in helping us expand the directory of blogs. We also combed through the American Street's "State Writes" page, eventually synchronizing their Northwest listings with ours.
At the end of February of 2005, after just one month of operation, our list had practically doubled. Today, of course, the directory is bigger than ever.
In April of 2005, as the directory continued to grow, we thought it might be useful to provide some kind of small visual to make the directory less confusing and more colorful.
We revamped the directory so that each link is associated with a tiny 16x16 pixel image to its left. If the blog has a favicon, we use that image. If not, we take a screenshot of the site and shrink it down to 16x16 pixels.
This one page is perhaps the most valuable resource Pacific Northwest Portal offers. It's like a telephone directory, except for it's for progressive bloggers. It connects the dots and helps foster a more united community.
And just think of how useful it is to someone who has no knowledge of the blogosphere, or to a blogger who's just starting out and wants to find other bloggers.
How are we able to continue adding new progressive blogs to our directory, month after month? Well, part of the reason is that more and more progressives are starting their own blogs, but of course we have to be able to locate them! Here's how we do it:
- We stick to a fairly simple schedule. Because the directory has gotten so big, and because updating it can be a chore, we do our updates in batches. For example, the week before last we added twenty blogs.
- Between site updates, we collect submissions for new listings. Anyone is welcome to use our Feedback page to submit their blog for inclusion to the directory. When a submission is made, we immediately visit that blog and determine whether it is a suitable candidate. (The only real requirement is that the author, or at least one of the authors, live in WA, OR, ID, or AK. Obviously, the writer has to be progressive and their blog has to be mostly about politics). If it meets our criteria, we add it to our waiting list.
- We also regularly comb through other blogrolls and lists to see if they have anything we're missing. If we find anything that matches our criteria, we add it to the waiting list. Also, sometimes bloggers who are already in the directory will send tips with links to new blogs they've discovered on their own.
- Once we have over half a dozen progressive blogs on our waiting list, we schedule an update. We visit every blog on the waiting list, recheck it for verification, and then we take a screenshot or download the site's favicon and store it in our offline images folder. Then, we check to see if the site has an RSS or Atom feed. If it does, we index the feed. If the blogger is also a Kossack and has linked to their user page or a diary they've written, we also schedule them to be added to our new Kos diary tracker, which tracks diaries written by Pacific NW Kossacks.
- Once we have all the information assembled, we update the directory and quickly re-alphabetize the list for each state. With the directory updated, we then program the new feeds we've just indexed into our aggregator so new entries from the newly added blogs will appear on our Highlights page. And, of course, we also update the Kos diary tracker.
- Finally, we debut the changes and start the process all over again.
Because we update incrementally, the process isn't quite as time consuming as it sounds - the real work comes at the end and usually just requires a few hours of teamwork.
Of the 214 blogs we currently list, thirty of the finest are directly syndicated on our website. While we don't individually track the other 184 blogs, we do track them collectively on the Highlights page, where you can see the latest eight posts for each state.
Additionally, every month we pick four blogs from the directory that we consider to be "under the radar" and give each a short promo and link from the Highlights page.
Daily Kos has been tremendously successful in creating a national community and a national conversation. But all politics is local, and that's the whole point behind Pacific Northwest Portal. We're connecting the dots to create a unified blogosphere locally.
If you've never heard of or seen our website before, I invite you to take a look and see how we're putting together the infrastructure to challenge the Republican Noise Machine....one blog at a time.