Is "Blogs United breakout" an oxymoron?
About three dozen of us are sitting in a big circle in a breakout room on the upper floor of the Austin Convention Center. It’s the “caucus” for Blogs United, a group created a couple of years ago by star Kossack kid oakland to encourage and support progressive bloggers on the local level.
I joined the Blogs United google group soon after it was formed, though I have to state for the record that I’ve been “nomail” on their emails for most of the time since joining. Sure, I’m interested in helping to build up progressive strength everywhere, but there’s just so much time.
Although there are quite a few Washington bloggers who’ve joined Blogs United, for most of the meeting I was the only representative of our state in this group; toward the end, Lynn Allen from the Institute for Washington’s Future popped in. There are other bloggers here from (at least) Florida, Missouri, Alabama, Texas, New Mexico, California, Vermont, Louisiana ... all extolling their local congressional or state races. Maybe it’s the flush of optimism, but it sure sounds like there are a whole bunch of great candidates to wrest legislative seats away from the other side.
There was much talk about building links across the states, of developing tools for common use and for common value. I’m not sure these “Twitter clouds” and other variations on building RSS feeds that will be meaningful and valuable for the great expanse of local blogs. Several of the participants described how they are actually reporting news instead of commentary and opinion (I’m not one of those who can describe any such activity). It does seem more and more that the “real” press have been abdicating their responsibility to actually cover stories. Sigh…
Comments
Hope you mentioned the Hotlist! ;^)
give my regards to Lynn.
Wow, two comments!
Dan, I did indeed mention the Hotlist, as well as Kari’s LeftyBlogs. It was right at the end of the session, however, and I’m not sure it sank in. I’ll have to find kid oakland to tell him a bit more about it.
J, I sat next to Lynn at Howard’s keynote speech last night. Always a pleasure to have some time with her.
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