I should preface this by stating that I am enormously appreciative of the contribution DKos has made to the progressive cause. I think it is fair to say that the DKos community can take a lot of credit for the success of Democrats in our most recent Congressional elections. So this post isn't really intended as a criticism, so much as a simple set of observations about some of the unintended consequences of the way the DKos infrastructure functions, and their impact on the larger blogosphere. See those observatons on the flip.
Crossposted at Conceptual Guerilla
For those who have studied my writings over the past four years -- both of you -- you will understand the significance of that word "infrastructure" as I use it. For me, infrastructure is everything. Consider the business corporation. They became the monsters they are, because state legislators starting a hundred fifty years ago decided that "limited liability" for corporations was a useful way to encourage the large scale capital formation necessary for things like railroads and steel mills. US Steel, Standard Oil, and Westinghouse were the result. They wouldn't exist without the government created legal infrastructure that made them possible. [Take that, libertarians.]
In the 1930's, the Roosevelt administration responded to the power of corporations in the job market by passing the National Labor Relations Act. This created the legal infrastructure for organized labor as a counterveiling force to "organized capital." That infrastructure greatly improved bargaining parity between capital and labor, and created the mid-century American middle class. The conservatives hated it of course, and since 1981 have systematically undermined that infrastructure to the point that union representation has declined from about 25% in the 1950's to roughly 10% today. As for the future, the corporation will again be taken in hand by counterveiling infrastructure. Either that or they will be taken in hand by mobs employing the simple infrastructure you get when you combine a tall tree with a short rope.
In fact, you are using a piece of the infrastructure that is undermining the power of elites, as we speak. It's called the internet, and it may be the single greatest contribution to democracy since the invention of the printing press. The infrastructural reason for the revolutionary power or the internet is very simple. The internet is a "pull" medium, whereas television and newspapers are "push" media. On television, you see what the broadcaster wants to show you. On the internet, you see you want to be shown. But that is perhaps, somewhat misleading. Ultimately, we all read and watch what someone else decides to show us. What gives us power are the choices we have.
Television offers fewer choices for a simple reason. It is expensive infrastructure that has to be paid for. You can pay for it, directly -- see HBO. Either that or advertisers pay for it. The guy who pays for it has a lot more to say about the content. In the case of television -- and rest of the mainstream media -- that means corporate America. They offer their homogenized narrow spectrum of opinion and perception because the expensive infrastructure prefers it. When you have to pay for that infrastructure, you need as many eyeballs as you can get your hands on, and you can't afford to be too controversial.
The internet is freed from that problem simply because the internet is cheap infrastructure. I pay 20 bucks a month for a site, and use one half of one percent of the bandwidth that 20 bucks pays for. The software that powers my site is open source, and didn't cost me a cent. In other words, just about anybody can set up a web page, and drive as many viewers to their site as their talent will permit. Markos is a prime example of an internet entrepreneur who started with a computer, an internet connection, and an open source CMS platform, and built a site that receives 4 million visits a week. As I said at the beginning, that same site can take at least some credit for the recent electoral reverses of the corporate neocons in the White House -- demonstrating the power of this medium, and the upstarts who have learned how to work it.
So what's wrong with the DKos infrastructure? Depending on your point of view, the answer may well be "nothing." I doubt seriously that Markos is much complaining about those 4 million visits a week. I certainly wouldn't complain, if I were him. How does he get them? Here is where understanding infrastructure comes in. His success is a direct function of his platform. Don't get me wrong, the writers at DKos -- including Kos himself -- are first rate. On the other hand, there are first rate writers all over the internet -- including many no one has ever heard of. Both Digby and his partner Poputonian offer consistently solid offerings everyday, and they have well earned their popularity. But they don't get 4 million visits a week. No single writer or even a small group of writers earns that kind of traffic.
But Kos isn't a "small group of writers" is it? DKos is a HUGE group of writers. It is community so big, one could almost call it a "sub-blogosphere." You don't really need to go anywhere else -- the operative word being "need." Everything going on the realm of politics, policy, economics, and international events is covered, usually fairly quickly. Not only that, it is covered adequately, in the sense that you can learn the important facts, and the obviously conclusions to be drawn from them. In some cases, it is covered superlatively. Kos doesn't cover all that stuff by himself, nor do his front pagers. That's way too big a job. Instead, the legion of diarists cover pretty much everything there is to cover. All you have to do is hang around, and watch the "recent diaries." But you'd better be quick, and you'd better not stay away too long, because that recent diary you're interested in won't be on the front page for long. My experience has been two hours, and it's gone. Sometimes they hang around for three, sometimes they're gone in 90 minutes. In other words, it is very easy to visit Daily Kos, never leave and never go anywhere else.
So? Is that bad? What's wrong with "one stop shopping?" Since you don't have to go anywhere else, Daily Kos offers something to writers like me that at first blush is very attractive. With four million visits a week, Daily Kos becomes the place for a writer to offer his wares -- something I do on a regular basis. This adds to the "stickiness" of the place. Because if a writer like me -- and there are legions of us hanging around the DKos community -- wants to rise above the background noise of the "recent diaries" list, we've got work to do. We've got to post everyday or close to it. We've got to cultivate our readers -- including a fair amount of good old fashioned "back scratching." All of that promotional effort of course, yields a bigger audience. When you add several dozen, or several hundred, diarists clamoring for a share of the audience, you get a lot of activity to the tune of -- there's that number again -- four million visits a week. Unfortunately, for the diarist, it is somewhat time consuming.
Here's a good example of why. Let's talk about that "recommend" button for just a minute. Why the hell is it over on the side bar? Why isn't it at the bottom of the post, right next to the "reply" button? The "recommend" button for comments is at the bottom, why not for diaries? I'll bet there are more than a handful of casual users who don't even know where it is simply because you have to look for it. If you want to use it, you have to scroll up the page to it, instead of clicking it immediately after you finish reading the article. In short, you have to go out of your way to "recommend" something. Why? At my site, "voting" is easy. Click to read the full article, and a counter records another "read." When there are enough "reads," the article appears in "recent popular content." You don't have to do shit -- except have enough interest to read the full post. At the end of the day, that is how people "vote." They vote with their mouse button. Why give them something extra to mess around with -- and then put it in a completely out of the way place?
The reason is simple, namely, to make the site more "sticky." Meanwhile, here is an unintended consequence -- or maybe it is not so "unintended" -- of the "recommend" system. "Recommends" come from the "stickiest" users. These are the very people who don't go anywhere else, because again, they don't really need to. All of these folks, as one might expect, have favorites who they "recommend." I expect a healthy number have figured out the desirability of the "autorecommend." See fave, recommend fave -- sight unseen. These are folks who make use of the "subscribe" system -- a must-use system if you are interested in promoting your work.
Here's the "so what?" There is very little room at the top. There is room for eight recommended diaries -- in a system so crowded your "recent diary" is gone in two hours. In fact, the system is so crowded, and the "recommended" category so full of established diarists, the site's management has come up with a "fix" in the form of the "diary rescue." Why not expand the "recommended" list, double it say. Why not create an intermediate level, that is more sticky than "recent," but not as sticky as "recommended?" Why do that? To broaden the range of viewpoint available. With eight spots, a handful of voices dominate the community. That is not to suggest that this elite, as it were, have not earned their popularity. I regularly read many of them myself. But with four million visits, and well over hundred thousand registered users, 20 or so voices is not representative of the entire community, I don't care how good they are.
And speaking of the "commnity" what community are we talking about? The Kos community is huge, and getting powerful. But wait, is there anybody else out there? As I said, you can visit Kos and never leave. Which means that you can promote yourself at Kos, or quickly find yourself irrelevant. Here is what my good friend Mykeru looks like these days. No your browser isn't broken. That's a black screen -- his own unique of saying "fuck it." Too bad, because that guy was previously one of the most unique, funny, incisive, and passionate voices on the internet. Sure, he's a little eccentric, but so am I. So are many of us. His only mistake was trying to run a one man blog in a blogosphere where giants have come to dominate. Those giants do very little to spread the love.
Here's a list of blogs regularly linked on the Kos front page. Digby, Averosis, Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, Talking Points Memo, and maybe three or four others. Are those folks any good? Well of course they are. But they aren't all there is -- by a mile. I get rescued here on a regular basis -- as in damn near every diary I write, anymore. That means I get a link to my Kos diary. I never get a link to my site -- and if I didn't post my diaries here, nobody would know who I was. In other words, I can work the Kos venue, or I can promote my own site. The Kos venue is set up, and functions, in such a way that I can't do both. Neither can legions of other small blogs like Mykeru. With the built in bottlenecks of the Kos architecture, only a handful of diarists will achieve any prominence. What appears to be this empowering community infrastructure, has in fact become a damper on the larger progressive blog community. Either you languish in your own private obscurity, or you come to the Kos community and enjoy a different kind of obscurity -- the kind you get in Times Square on New Years Eve. As James Joyce said to Hemingway, "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Now lest this turn into a whine-a-thon, let me move along to what I am doing at my site -- which I humbly offer as different model for how to build a progressive blog community. That model answers a simple question. "What is a 'community?'" Is the crowd at Times Square on New Years Eve a community? How about 70,000 people packed into a football stadium? Wait, I've got a better suggestion. Four years ago, along with a half a dozen other folks, I launched a Yahoo group. That group has grown to some sixty members, eight or ten of which are active. For the past four years, I have scarcely had to surf the internet at all, because most of what is current -- including a fair number of Kos diaries -- shows up on the list serve for the group. Like the larger Kos community, friendships have been forged, disagreements have been aired, tempers have occassionally flaired, but the core of that group has been more or less stable for the past three years.
That is what communities are made of. It is a function of our evolutionary biology, that human beings do not function well is mass groups. It is neither the nation-state, nor the city, nor the family on the small end, that is the basic social unit. It is the village. When you look at how human beings interact, and how they associate, you will find that even large cities wind up being complex collections of villages.
As for blog sites, most have figured out the basic paradigm. Comments are central, and blogs without comments become sterile empty places nobody hangs around. Add comments, and people will leave comments. Set up multiple bloggers, cross commenting, and bringing in readers who leave more comments, and just like that, you've built a virtual village. This is what all good blogs become. They are not just a bulletin board, not just an outlet for one person. They are a meeting place. They are the corner bar of cyberspace, with the interesting added feature of being instantly linked to dozens and even hundreds of other corner bars just like them. That is how you build a community. You create the infrastructure not for individual entrants into a stadium, but for the creation and easy interaction of villages. Using this as the model for a community, the Kos "community" fails for all the reasons I have listed.
Here is how I have set things up. First, there is our "front page" community, which basically consists of me and the friends I have accumulated over the past four years. Only, they're more than just friends of mine. They are good writers in their own right. Still, you are not limited to that "front page" community. Using my groups module, you can set up your own -- with essentially the same functionality as Yahoo groups. Add the usual "popular blog" functions, and you've got a "recommend list" so that the front page is not limited to the front page community. But wait, what about the rest of the blogosphere. I've got that covered. Over on the right sidebar are the syndication feeds. You see, I have made blog surfing a whole lot easier. You don't have to "ride circuit," they come to you. The list is fairly small right now, but it will grow -- and I encourage suggested feeds to add to it.
Notice that I have pretty much done away with the nearly worthless "blogroll." Those syndication links are about the same size, but they carry more information. They tell you what's new, and give you a title. They give you a reason to visit, or tell you not to bother today -- check in later. This gives a boost to less than daily blogs -- like mine, for example. I've been told until I'm blue, "you have to post everyday." Maybe. But I'm sorry, it won't be as good. I don't do the "daily story." Daily Kos does the daily story -- and does it well. I do longer, in depth articles, that take longer to read -- and therefore, take longer to write. For the length of essays that I write, I am actually quite prolific. But I can't do it everyday.
Oh, and I've got something for Kos diarists. You see, Kos has added -- and good for him -- syndication feeds to individual diaries. Over on my right sidebar you will see a few of them, including my front pagers, and select supporters from Kos who have been particularly generous in recommending my diaries. For the next little while -- until the list gets too crowded -- I am offering any registered user at my site a syndication link to your Kos diary. No subscription, no waiting by the "recent" list. Just drop by cg.com, and check the feed for your faves. If you really want to get fancy, you can round up your friends and fellow diarists and set up a group. Because after all, you've got to do that kind of stuff to generate visibility, over there. I offer a place to meet.
So there is my innovation to blogland. Groups for small communities, feeds to as many wide and varied blog voices as I -- and you -- can find, and a handy interface to Kos for those looking for a place to "huddle up." So post your Kos Id in the comments -- at my site. While you're at it, post your favorite blog. I'll put them up as quickly as I can. Soon -- as soon as work out some technical details -- you will be able to add your own feeds.