and, quite frankly, the quality of what you find on either site is atrocious. huffpo -- can't be bothered to pay people. fuck them. when i was building max's site in summer of 2004, reading the blogs max circulated amongst, half the time it was "open thread" bullshit. these days, the comment section is like what happens when someone spills a beer on someone else in the middle of a crowded bar)
huffpo started out with her own cash.
here's an analysis i did of those numbers (NB: I was off in the analysis of $$ but it was still a chunk of change -- about 1/2 of what i guessed IIRC, we ran the numbers publicly at some other site but I"m too lazy to look it up):
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/02/12/flicked-off/
<quote>What is astounding about this statement is that he doesn't even acknowledge the Golden Rule not to mention that the 'nobody story' is a massive denial of reality. Consider, for instance, this graph from Alexa: http://blog.pulpculture.org/images/kosstats.gif
What we see here is a large rise in traffic after the 2004 elections. What was happening all during 2004? Dkos was getting infusions of cash from his involvement with various campaigns and from the blogads. When I was working on Max's site, during the summer of 2004, I remember figuring that Dkos was raking in about $120,000/year in ads alone.
That makes for a lot of capital that, not surprisingly, enabled Dkos to eventually generate even more traffic. Of course, it didn't happen overnight. But, it's taken off and now he's accruing the benefits now though I'm sure he's spending more, too.
The benefits are accruing to the tune of $480,000/year in ad revenue. Even if you compensate all the free labor donated in the past, you're still talking a $250,000/year enterprise during this year (most likely) and it's going to skyrocket the rest of this year as the election season heats up.
Maybe it's time for public programming rules applied to the Internets ™. :)
I have little against making money. He's free to become a millionaire.
But, Kos shouldn't pretend that what he's doing is in any real sense democratic. Afterall, Kos rode the crest of a desire for substantive democracy for something other than mere procedural democracy. With the blogosophere came calls for using it as a way to have a substantive voice in the public sphere, in civil society. (See '<http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/30/the-beer-cup-is-empty/>The<http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/30/the-beer-cup-is-empty/> Beer Cup is Empty," "<http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/06/bake-your-own-bread-n-circuses/>Baking Our Own Bread and Circuses," and "<http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/08/googlepark-panem-et-circenses/>Googlepark: Panem et Circenses.")
By not fostering that, by not generously giving back to the very community that made him, then he is doing nothing more than, as Dkos notes below, acting just like the privileged few who excluded him and thwarted his dreams.
As for the relative paucity of top female progressive bloggers, Moulitsas is indifferent: "I haven't given it a lot of thought. I find it totally uninteresting. What I'm interested in is winning elections, and I don't give a shit what you look like."
Of course, but shouldn't Kos care about that and wonder why? It seems to me to be at the heart of what a more progressive vision of the Democratic party was supposed to be all about. Yes? The paucity may not have to do with lack of talent, as Kos implies, but lack of interest in what women are writing about. Why should women support people who find what we have to say "uninteresting" and not meriting your concern?
And this is revealing. Democracy is apparently about becoming rich:
The Washington Monthly profile of Moulitsas included a revealing quote, in which he expressed disappointment at not being able to fulfill his dream of making it big in the tech industry back in 1998: "Maybe at some time, Silicon Valley really was this democratic ideal where the guy with the best idea made a billion dollars, but by the time I got there at least, it was just like anything else a bunch of rich kids who knew each other running around and it all depended on who you knew."
</quote>
At 04:54 PM 7/1/2008, Jim Straub wrote:
>>trade unionism is a no-brainer.? With increasing union
>>
>>density -- two, three, many Andy Sterns -- unions should
>
>Blech! Shudder. Two, three, many SEIU's, UNITE HERE's, CWA's,
>yeah--- but let's not multiply our problems with Cmde Andy! Stern
>himself is a net negative by now, I think. Let's hope for retirement
>soon and pray Burger doesn't become the prez next. I'd take basically
>any major SEIU leader over Stern or Burger at this point.
>
>I agree with the other thing- why isn't there a more left equivalent
>to Kos or Huffpost? On a local level maybe indymedia used to sort of
>be that (but does anyone read it anymore?), and Z is I guess that for
>intellectual anarchisty content, but neither even ever approached
>being a broad clearinghouse for the radical left. Maybe rad left's
>too fractious to even get together on the interwebs?
>
>
>___________________________________
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