A brief thought as we enter the last 90 days of the campaign season, and look forward (pleasepleaseohsweetlordwecanttakeanymorepleaseplease) to a political situation wherein much of the Netroots will likely be more focused on pushing our guys towards us than on pushing back against the right wing:
We've got to clean up our Meta.
Over on MyDD, they're going through another round of meta posts about the nature of the site vis a vis moderation and rec list thresholds. Every community site does this from time to time (anyone want some pie?). But such conversations are invariably site-specific: sure, they might reference how [whatever topic] is handled on [whatever other site], but it's all aimed at changing site functionality in that specific corner of Blogania.
On the other side, we have the sort of meta posts that I once did during my tantrum-cum-protest over the primary war here--what I like to style "Netroots theory"--focusing more on how online political activism may transform over time and how we should approach such transitions.
Are these really such closely related topics as to both fall under the same header of "Meta"?
Taxonomical quibbling aside, we really should start distinguishing between the sort of posts that discuss site-specific matters from those that discuss overall Netroots movement strategy.
In some instances, that distinction is very murky, as is the case with posts about Orange to Blue, Better Dems, and other site-specific campaigns that aim to affect the wider political reality well beyond the confines of the 'sphere (for example, does a post on DailyKos describing the breakup of Blue Majority count as Netroots theory, while one announcing the birth of Orange to Blue count as site-specific?).
Still, the coming (knock on wood) shift in the power structure in DC is, one way or another, going to have profound implications for how we in the Netroots are perceived and received by those we've helped empower. We need to be exploring those potential implications now, to a much greater extent than we currently are.
And while we explore those larger-scale ramifications, we of course are still going to be trying to improve the ways in which our online communities function.
The consequences, should we fail to begin making these distinctions, could be so dire as to rise to the level of "utterly dismissable minor annoyances." But it still could be a useful organizing tool, to help us keep in mind what we do as a movement, and how we act as a community, are not necessarily the same things.