As Jacques Chester commented once before the Au blogs missed out on the slash/scoop tech wave and nearly all come under the wordpress/blogspot banner. This means the dailykos/redstate/eurotrib type diarying has not occurred.

Essentially Slash and Scoop are not blog platforms as we think of them now. They are systems with a community-led focus built into their design. Slash empowers readers to submit stories for selection by editors and anyone to comment. Scoop went further and allowed private diaries and voting queues to determine what would reach the front page.

This means that Daily Kos and Redstate (both of them Scoop sites) are massively busy and influential because users didn’t need to go anywhere else. A great diary story could easily be promoted to the front page. There was a lower barrier to entry on commenting on other diaries and stories, plus the useful niceties like threaded conversations and member histories which have yet to make it to third-generation platforms like Wordpress.

I could go on and on — in fact I already have — so I’ll instead direct people to my posts on the topic. This one in particular.

-Just because your navel is uninspiring doesn’t mean there aren’t some spectacular ones out there, well worth a bit of a gaze if you get the chance
- Tacit knowledge often only finds overt expression when practitioners from a domain get together in highly fluid discourse. This was definitely the case in the search engine optimisation discussion which developed in one session. We all had to take an oath that we would never write the dark secrets down.
- Some things just don’t translate into browser-rendered glyphs, like sandwiches de-luxe, and after-conference drinks.
- It might seem strange to you, but it was heard oft repeated on the day ” It’s good to be able put a face to the attitude”.

Give it a lash next time you get a chance.

That’s because the willingness in a relatively disengaged political culture like ours to engage in political discussion is always going to be a very small minority interest, and it’s one that has been colonised by the mainstream media.

A very thoughtful piece, Mark. I would agree with the above and probably most of it, though I don’t have the benefit of a comprehensive macro or micro-view of the subject or even given it all that much thought.

But my impression is that there is a swag of excellent to good, independent (progressive) political blogs in the US (much less so in Australia, but then we are a far smaller population and some of the best don’t allow for comments at all), which may comfort the afflicted and provide a measure of catharsis and release for the self-selected, shifting community of writers, readers and commentators, but probably don’t/won’t really mean that much in terms of broader political influence for some of the reasons you’ve outlined At least for the foreseeable future and given no environmental changes that may change that.

My view is based to a large extent on nothing more scientific than my perception that most politically engaged people in Australia, where the blog options are far fewer than in the US, simply don’t read political blogs at all, let alone contribute to them – for a variety of reasons. I guess those reasons need examining too, to get a fuller picture. I think this is a reasonable deduction given the nos who ever comment here, one of the most popular political blogs. I am the only person I know in my social/political/work circles who reads LP or comments on it, I am pretty sure. And I think that is a shame. Of course, there may be some lurkers that I don’t know about!

Only about a dozen of the 226 senators and MHRs have website links to YouTube, Myspace and Facebook, though most Labor Party MPs have links through to Kevin 07. Don’t they have teenage daughters?

Peter Garrett has 3137, presumably old rockers, but Malcolm Turnbull is trailing behind, with 294.

That adds up to more than one per day between 1987 and 1994…