Blogs Going Local

Daily Kos, the progressive blogsite, had a fascinating diary today from the owners of a Pacific Northwest blog. These regional blog owners acknowledge their debt to the national focus of DailyKos, but also encourage the development of regional blogs.

Their new blog, Pacific Northwest Portal, has the following features:

• It syndicates thirty of the region's finest progressive blogs — thirteen each from Washington and Oregon, and four from Idaho.



• Provides a directory of ALL known progressive blogs throughout the region. In addition to the 30 syndicated blogs, there are 154 others listed in the Regional Blogs Directory, for a total of 184 progressive blogs.



• Provides a directory of major media outlets, with almost two hundred links to local newspapers and television/radio stations.



• It provides newsfeeds searching the mainstream media for political news.



• It contains a listing of all the regional Air America stations on every single page.



• It displays recent business and labor news, as well as traffic and weather information.

Another innovation is a Highlights page, which is divided into two major sections — Today in the Pacific Northwest, and National Blog Headlines.

If this concept of regional portals takes off, we will know that Tip O'Neill's adage about all politics being local is true on the Internet as well!

Folksonomy

According to Wikipedia, a folksonomy is:

a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords. More colloquially, this refers to a group of people cooperating spontaneously to organize information into categories. In contrast to formal classification methods, this phenomenon typically only arises in non-hierarchical communities, such as public websites, as opposed to multi-level teams and hierarchical organization. Since the organizers of the information are usually its primary users, advocates of folksonomy believe it produces results that reflect more accurately the population's conceptual model of the information.

The most popular political blog, Daily Kos, has just started going with this collaborative system of "tagging" blog diaries and comments, which will make it easier for people to find content that is useful for them.

In the past, the creator of a website could choose the keywords that were most meaningful for them, with educated guesses as to what those searching for the website would type into Google or other search engines. Now, with Folksonomy, everyone accessing the blog can add descriptive tags. I might tag a blog entry as "Valerie Plame" and "Joe Wilson," but you can add the tags "CIA," "Karl Rove," or "Scooter Libby" if you want to.

A recent article from Wired magazine offers these tips for tagging:

1. Use combinations of simple tags rather than inventing complex ones. For instance, use tags CIA, LEAK and INVESTIGATION, instead of CIA-LEAK-INVESTIGATION.


2. Use at least two tags for each item. More tags is better (up to a point).


3. Try to think of what tags people might use to search for something and use those. For example, PLAME, ROVE, FITZPATRICK, NOVAK, TREASON, OUTING, OPERATIVE might all be good tags for an entry on the Valerie Plame outing.


4. Try to re-use existing tags.


5. Keep it simple. Don't use tags that are redundant.

I guess as visitors start to add tags to your websites and blogs, you will see how others view your information and how it gets categorized in their minds. This sounds like the ultimate in feedback for writers, and a great way for politicos to see if their message is being received by their target audiences.

Take the survey!

The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University is conducting a survey of donors who contributed to presidential primary and general election candidates in the 2004 election. The institute is particularly interested in donors who contributed $400 or less, and donors who contributed over the Internet. The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.

The Institute conducts cutting-edge research that analyzes how the Internet affects American politics, with the goal of improving democracy.

Please take a minute to assist in this worthy effort. You can click on the survey here: www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=865121395347.