Having read more and more of the blogs in Florida in recent months, I’ve come to notice a few significant problems with the progressive blogs in Florida. The combination of these factors — whatever the reasons behind them, legitimate or not — hurts both our attempts to change things and our chances at influencing elections and policies in the Sunshine state.
(If I leave any blogs out of this section, it’s nothing personal, just a lack of knowledge on my part. Feel free to add anyone I miss in comments.)
1. Not enough frequency of posting: Most Florida blogs don’t post more than a few posts a day. It’s not really all that likely for anyone to build up a large audience without frequent and near-constant updates. Only Bark Bark Woof Woof, Pushing Rope, Discourse.net and Blast Off! regularly post more than a few posts a day (at least of the progressive blogs I’m aware of).
2. Not enough on Florida politics: Most of us don’t post much about Florida politics. This is really key, though, since we can’t have a whole lot of influence on Florida elections and policies by writing about things in Washington. As far as I can tell, Blast Off!, Florida Kossacks, Florida Politics, Robin “Roblimo” Miller, the 13th Juror, Smashed Frog, FLA Politics, Pushing Rope, any of the one million blogs Ray Seaman posts at and the Florida posters at Daily Kos are the only progressive blogs that regularly post about Florida issues and politicians.
3. No real community: Florida is a big state and that means that a whole lot of us have never met each other. Unlike some of the smaller states, it’s much harder for us to get together and talk shop and politics and grow our personal and professional relationships. Bark Bark Woof Woof’s Mustang Bobby, the Florida Netroots group started up by MeowMissy and Florida Kossacks under Gene seem to be doing the most to change this.
4. Lack of knowledge on Florida politics: One of the reasons I think so few of us post regularly on Florida politics is that we know so little about it. Some of this comes from the fact that our media doesn’t cover it in-depth enough for us to feel comfortable talking about Florida politics.
5. Little in the way of commenting and linking: FLA Politics and Pushing Rope do a good job of regularly linking to other Florida progressive blogs and others do it from time to time, but we could all do it more. Commenting is even worse. Most of us don’t comment and most sites get few, if any comments. It’s difficult to build a community if we don’t talk to each other.
I imagine most of these things are related and probably relate even more to the fact that most of us have day jobs that take up most of our time. I completely understand that. The good news, though, is that these things are being addressed.
1. More posting: Personally, I’ve been trying to step up my own posting and I’ve been trying to encourage others to do the same. Later in the year, I’d like to discuss creating a Florida Netroots/Blogger Awards — something along the lines of the Koufax Awards (maybe the Bob Graham awards? Other suggestions?) — where we reward those bloggers and online activists who are getting the job done. I’ll post about that later. And keep in mind that everyone is invited to sign up for the FPC blog and is invited to cross-post anything related Florida here. Similarly, you can all sign up for membership at FLA Politics and create diaries just like at Daily Kos.
2. More Florida posts: This one is the easiest. Just by expanding our personal knowledge of the topic, we’ll be able to ramp this one up. Read other blogs or newspapers and respond. Link to them. Comment on Florida posts. Learn about your elected officials. Tell us about your personal political experiences. Set a goal to do at least one Florida post a day (or week). Tie national issues in to state politicians. We have 27 members of Congress from Florida and they have an impact on nearly every national issue. Floridians know little about this interaction. The more you post about Florida, the more you learn and the more the rest of us learn and then we all win.
3. More community: This one is moving ahead quickly, particularly with the growth and cross-membership of groups like FPC, the Florida Netroots group and Florida Kossacks. Our meetings at JJ on June 9 and at the FDP state convention in October will help as well. This is another area where we can take some initiative. Make it your goal to meet at least one other progressive blogger or Internet activist before the end of the year. You can start with our comprehensive list, which may need some new blogs added. Feel free to dive right in. Hopefully, the award will help with this, too.
4. More knowledge: We’re working on forging a closer relationship with the state Democratic Party, which should increase our access to information. The FPC Wiki should also help more and more bloggers as it grows in quantity and quality. We all have to take some personal responsibility on this one, though, and learn more. It’s good to start with the daily round-up at FLA Politics and official newspaper blogs like The Buzz, Naked Politics and Central Florida Political Pulse. Reading each others’ writing will help, too. But, seriously, how many of you have even read the Florida Constitution or looked up the voting record or your state or Congressional representatives? I can’t say that I’ve done it enough. Who can? Let’s change that. I’m going to start a series of posts where I examine the content of the Florida constitution — every word of the official document will appear here over the next year or so.
5. More linking and commenting: Another easy one. Make it a goal to comment on at least one post from a Florida blog each day. Or link to at least one other blog per day. Or do both. Comments and links don’t have to be in-depth or intense. Most of us just want some feedback that someone out there is reading our writing and thinks enough of it to drop us a brief comment or link. If nothing else, link your posts to the FPC Wiki. Link to the politicians you talk about and place a link to your posts on the Wiki pages. You can also find a great list of blogs to read, comment on and link to at the FPC site. Join FLA Politics, join FPC, join the Florida Netroots group, join Florida Kossacks.
Together, these things look like a lot, but individually, these things are easy and they are effective. The benefits here are cumulative and they grow and grow over time. The more of this stuff we do, the more we learn, the more we get noticed, the more readers we get, the more influence we get, the more impact we have and the better things become in the state and in teh world. Get to work, we need you.
I definitely share your thoughts about comments. We could-and should-comment on each other’s work. And-when a blogger receives a comment, respond-get readers to come back to engage in a conversation.
Building a community is key and I have watched with some interest the Koufax Awards this year…it appears many that post nominations “know” each other quite well.
I post once daily-it’s the day job thing…but also, it seems as if I already spend a lot of time at the computer. I would love to know how those who post frequently manage the time to post so often during the day-and it could be, that some of us will be the dailies and some, the more frequents…I guess it’s all involves personal style.
The JJ will be a great start to get organized. I’ll be there and look forward to meeting you all. It’s a start to take back this great state.
Thanks for addingTalk to Me to the blog list. I’d love to part of the FPC as well.
These are great ideas to ponder previous to the JJ blogger meeting.
Well, o.k. I’ll expand a little.
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8511928608306371894
I’ve had a bit of a debate with myself over whether or not to create a blog or website to accompany Florida Netroots.
My reservations about doing so are as follows:
- There are already some quality blogs out there (FPC, Fla Politics, FL-Kossacks) that need more people contributing diaries to them. I don’t want to dilute the pool.
- If Florida Netroots were to have its own site, it needs to have a different focus than the others, rather than duplicate what is already being done. To an extent we have that, but I don’t feel its quite fleshed out enough.
- Time. As you said, to really draw in traffic you have to regularly provide content. Having a web presence requires constant care and feeding in order to be successful.
That said, I agree with everything you’ve said here and would like the Florida Netroots to play a part in building up the Progressive Blogosphere.
Another big tip for supporting the progressive blogosphere: If you see Google, Yahoo or whatever ads on progressive sites, please consider clicking on them and visiting with the sponsors for a minute. This puts some coin in progressive bloggers hands. Its a good practice everyone should incorporate into their everyday surfing.
We need is a central blog with many contributors and a reason for those contributors to participate.
Ken, these are all great suggestions, particularly the cross linking, which boosts everyone’s search rankings and relevancy on Google, Technorati, Yahoo and other search engines.
Thanks for getting these ideas out there. We at the Florida Democratic Party are excited to be taking part in discussions about growing the netroots community in Florida.
Ken, you’re right that frequent posting is key (although “several times a day” sounds adequate to me). Two of our three editors at Pensito Review are in Florida; one is in California. Like many blogs, we hope to attract a national audience but when a Florida issue could be of national interest, we post away on it. We aren’t trying to rival Florida Politics, though. Which is good, since he’s got it DOWN.
Thanks for the kind words, Kenneth. The problem might be is we are not selling enough stripper T-shirts. Who wants to buy the Sticks of Fire thong.
i am not a writer..ie Vox, Litbrit, but i do try to get my point across everyday. want to find Tampa Bay area progressive blogs, vist my site.
There are many Progressive blogs in the Tampa Area that you did not mention.
It may also help if the original writer responds to comments left on any given post.
Thanks for the shouts-out, Ken. I definitely would be up for more interaction with Florida progressive bloggers.
I do my best to keep Blast Off! updated regularly, but I also am mindful of keeping my day job.
I also do try to keep a good mix of Florida and national topics, because my readership (meager though it may be, but growing) is nationwide but interested in and somewhat concentrated in Florida. If I feel that I’ve done too much, say, on the latest Bush scandal (pick your favorite), then I’ll scour the local and state media for something more Florida-related.
But as the person who coined “America’s Glans™” to identify south Florida, as a spin-off of another term I have tried to popularize, “America’s Wang™,” for the whole state
, I do like to think I have a Florida blog with a national reach, as opposed to the other way around.
(Incidentally, if we’re going to have Florida lefty blog awards, they should be named after Lawton Chiles. IMHO.)
The problem is that those of us with full-time jobs have little time to keep up our own Web sites or online journals, let alone help maintain someone else’s. Some friends and I in the Sarasota/Bradenton area wrestled with this problem; we wanted to do a local-interest, group-run website, but none of us really had time.
This blog aggregation site, created by local programmer Logan Tygart, was the solution: sarasotaspeaks.com
Another, older, more regional blog aggregator: tampablab.com
Aggregation gives each writer/journalist/blogger control of his or her own work, which as the Obama campaign’s recent takeover of a volunteer’s effort shows, is a necessity in a world where paid political operatives apparently feel volunteers or outsiders are kind of like dirt — except less valuable.
If I wanted to set up a popular, useful site that would give insight into the online thoughts of Florida progressive bloggers and/or journalists, I’d build an RSS-based aggregation site similar to the ones I mentioned above.
Naturally, in the spirit of fairness, I’d share the code with Florida regressives so that they, too, could have their own little online home.