Blogging

While doing some research a couple of weeks ago for a course I’m teaching, I came across this interesting Brookings Institution “book chapter”:http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/gs/cf/sourcebk01/InternetChap10.pdf of how US election law affects political activities on the Internet. Reading between the lines, it appears to me that the Federal Election Commission has been strenuously trying to avoid getting sucked into the quagmire of regulating political conduct on the Internet – but that it is, sooner or later, going to have to start engaging in rulemaking. Trevor Potter and Kirk L. Jowers, the authors of the chapter don’t really discuss how, or whether, election law should apply to blogs. There are some fascinating questions here for future regulation and lawmaking. Should there be disclosure requirements for blogs (like the two blogs “authored by paid advisers”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/08/politics/main659955.shtml to the Thune senatorial campaign in South Dakota) that are intimately linked to a political campaign? Should blogging that is expressly aimed at supporting the election of a particular candidate be treated as a political contribution, or as volunteer activity? Should the kinds of restriction that apply to coordination between 527s and political campaigns be extended to prominent political blogs?

I note that I’m not an expert in electoral law. Still, I feel fairly confident in making two predictions. First: that these activities _will_ be regulated. As political blogs become a more established part of the political landscape, they will increasingly be treated as another means of political expression, advocacy and fundraising – and the current regulatory regime will, one way or another, be extended to cover them. The only question is how the balance between free political speech and the need to regulate organized political activities is struck. Second, that whatever regulations are promulgated will prove awkward and uncomfortable for bloggers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Bloggers have gotten used to operating in a relatively freewheeling environment – as they get absorbed into the existing political system, this is going to change.

Update: “Luis Villa”:http://tieguy.org/blog/ points in comments to this very interesting “take”:http://zonkette.blogspot.com/2005/02/fec-talk-tomorrow-abstract-in-progress.html on how the FEC _should_ evolve from Howard Dean’s former election coordinator, Zephyr Teachout.

Two slightly worrying posts that suggest to me that the linked economy of the blogosphere might be more fragile than we would like. First, Brad DeLong gives us an economist’s take on Technorati’s “recent difficulties”:http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000292.html.
[click to continue…]

One of the nice thing about being an amateur blogger is that, as soon as I’m five feet away from the computer, none of it matters anymore. Would that all troubles were this simple.

I’m sure that I speak for everyone at Crooked Timber in extending our best wishes to Glenn Reynolds and his wife. May her recovery be speedy, and may they spend many more happy years together.

I’ve just seen that we’re through to the final stages of the “Best Group Blog” category of the Koufax awards. As Dan observed at an earlier stage of this process, CT has a sorry enough history in these awards.

bq. Oh god, it’s the same every year. We get nominated as “Best Group Blog”, which means “Maybe about Ninth Or Tenth Best Blog On A Good Day, But There’s A Group Blog Category So We’ll Nominate Them In That”. And then we lose.

If you want to show Dan that he’s talking smack for once, exercise your democratic rights, and “head over there and vote for us”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001709.html (while you’re at it, consider “giving the nod”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001724.html to Belle’s classic “and a pony”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html , which is up for the best humorous post). If any further reason is needed, we’ve already gotten endorsements from Fafnir and the Medium Lobster (although Giblets has apparently decided in a fit of pique to vote for Obsidian Wings instead).

Update: Looks like the awards site is down (I suspect due to bandwidth limits) – will update this again when it reappears.

Update 2: Site back up.

Our own Henry Farrell was on “NPR this morning”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4461850 talking with Scott Simon about blogs and their role in propagating rumors.

The eminently reasonable Jack O’Toole has been driven to despair by this one-two punch.

This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. (emphasis added) What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.

[click to continue…]

Like “Ted”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003098.html, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. “1000 Bars”:http://thousandbars.blogspot.com/ is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.

Per my Amazon Associates fundraising efforts, I was going to send
another check for about $150 to the Singapore Red Cross. But they’ve
maxed out their fundraising. In general, tsunami
relief seem to be doing OK. So who should I give to, do you think?
Oxfam general fund?

[click to continue…]

Try “Juan Cole’s critique of Jonah Goldberg”:http://www.juancole.com/2005/02/goldberg-v.html and his ilk. Fewer calories and more satisfying.

Blogger Joe Gordon, sacked by British bookselling chain Waterstone’s (see “an earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003101.html ) seems to have been offered “a better job by some nicer people”:http://www.woolamaloo.org.uk/2005/02/my-interstellar-journey-to-forbidden.htm . Splendid!

Crooked Timber has been out of commission for the past day or so. Our hosting provider had a hardware problem on one of its file servers, and fixing it took longer than they thought. The upshot was that this site was accessible the whole time, but everything was read-only: any attempt to post a comment, or write a post explaining what was wrong, or do anything that involved creating any file on the server, would get an error. Sorry about this: we didn’t have any control over it. But now here we are again, I hope.

I am reviewing data about blog authors and blog readers (I don’t just mean aggregate numbers but specific demographic info about them). As far as I know there have been few systematic studies of these questions. The recent data memo by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has some helpful figures as does their earlier report on Content Creation Online (p.5.). Some have collected related data by analyzing blogs. We also have some information from reports by commercial firms. Plus we have some figures from informal surveys conducted online, but unfortunately these are not at all representative. I want to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Please point me to additional sources that come to mind. Thanks.

We’re dealing with a flood of trackback spam this morning. Sorry for even more inconvenience than usual. We will get around to upgrading eventually, even though my past self wisely tells me “not to”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html.

Crooked Timber aren’t the only lefties to be attacked for failing to celebrate the Iraqi elections before the sun hit the yardarm yesterday morning. Intrepid sleuth-columnist, “Justin Darr”:http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/darr/050130, of Renew America, is on the case. He outs “Stephen Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/01/im_a_what.html, that notorious “radical”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/01/soros.html and bête-noir of the “Republican establishment”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/01/howard_dean_hat.html, and Stephen Green, the saturnine Svengali behind Bolshevik agitprop collective “Vodkapundit”:http://www.vodkapundit.com, as undercover members of the “Let’s Pretend It Didn’t Happen Faction” of the allied Internet Liberal Bloggers of America.

bq. a group who broke with the traditional liberal habit of talking endlessly about anything so long as it can be twisted into a childish penis reference about Vice President Cheney, and said nothing.

Still, Mr. Darr is more charitable than Ms. Malkin – he acknowledges that there may be an innocent explanation for the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy’s failure to blog on Iraq by lunchtime.

bq. Perhaps it was unfair of me to look into their sites on Sunday afternoon when so many liberals are just beginning emerge from the drug induced haze of their traditional weekend medicinal marijuana benders.