Blue Crab Boulevard

“Ineffective?”

Don Surber takes exception to remarks made by ~~NRO~~ FRC Web director Joe Carter about center-right bloggers. (Ed Note: Correction per comment from Don Surber.)

Jim Garaghty at NRO was part of a panel hosted by the Family Research Council and posted about it, linking to remarks by its Web director Joe Carter. On his blog, Carter observed: “The fact that many center-right bloggers care more about getting linked by a radical libertarian than they do in discussing the concerns of their fellow conservatives is one of the primary reasons the Right blogosphere is a failing to have the same impact as the Left.”

What’s with the shot at Instapundit? Let’s go to the board, shall we?

Who stopped the nomination of Harriet Miers?

Who stopped amnesty for illegal aliens?

Who helped get FISA extended this summer?

Who is fighting pork and winning a battle here and there?

Above all, who hung in there — and hangs in there — on the Iraq War?

They call us 29 percenters or whatever Bush’s job approval is. We hang in there because we believe in freedom and the liberation of Iraq. We know our history. We know right from wrong. We hate war, but we know this is a battle that is fought either over there or over here.

What have the lefty blogs done? Ask Sen. Ned Lamont.

Contrary to the routine accusations (more properly: projections) of the left, the right, or center-right, does not - as far as I know - coordinate worth a darn. I get a few emails from a few people with interesting - or not - items. Any of which I may or may not blog about. Maybe I'm not in the loop here, but I personally am not on a bunch of highly coordinated mailing lists from a group of dictatorial authoritarians who decide what story may and may not be blogged about. As are those who travel with Kos and Kompany - Kos having admitted to coordinating messages with big lefty sites.

But we here on the uncoordinated, unaffiliated and "ineffectual" right have managed to fight back against some of the worst excesses. (Both from the left and from the right.) We have had some victories, some defeats and some draws. But we are not out of the game. Maybe the only way to push back against that increasingly authoritarian left is to coordinate messages. But does that work, in the end?

Blogosphere | Gaius Thursday, 25 October , 2007

By don surber, Thursday, 25 October , 2007 @ 9:19 pm

Thanks for the link. Clarification (and it is my fault for the confusion) Carter is with FRC
By Gaius, Thursday, 25 October , 2007 @ 9:27 pm

Thnaks, Don. I’ve corrected it.
By Mwalimu Daudi, Thursday, 25 October , 2007 @ 10:07 pm

These days youse guys are 38 percenters. The Kossacks are the 29 percenters. Or maybe they are 23 percenters. Or maybe 11 percenters. Or maybe Congress has reached single digits while I was not looking.
By Geoffb, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 12:33 am

Is this an argument over whether “top down” “authoritarian” beats “bottom up” ‘freedom loving”. We have been there done that and settled it in the 80’s.

Free flowing free market of ideas, dynamic capitalistic creative destruction, beat New Soviet Man style, dictatorial, we know what’s best for you, Five Year Plans.

On the left ideas come from the few at the top and are broadcast down. This limits the range of ideas to what these few can imagine. They can speak with a loud voice but it limits what can be said.

On the right ideas bubble up from everywhere and are debated and the best ones make it out to everywhere. More sources and more discussion make for better ideas and ideas more in tune with reality. This makes for many softer voices but when a really powerful idea hits these soft voices will be more effective than the loud one on the left.
By Quilly Mammoth, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 5:17 am

“Out of the Loop”??? You mean you’re not getting the weekly check from Darth Rove? Now that he is “officially” out of the Administration it may be hard to hook you up….but I can try if you want me too.
By Gaius, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 5:39 am

I sent in all the boxtops, but Karl never sent me the secret decoder ring.
Damn him.
By syn, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 7:04 am

I was hooked into reading blogs late 2001, however over the years I have noticed that most Americans still do not have the high level of interest that the blogosphere claims. From my experience if something big happens, like Rathergate, most people I know would have no idea unless I emailed the link. Further, I was actually accused recently when the topic of Iraq came up of reading ‘those crazy blogsites’ and this was by a devoted reagan conservative who doesn’t read blogs. She read NRO but that’s a member of the guild not the blogosphere.

Talk radio has a bigger audience and far more impact than blogs do. For example, unless Dennis Miller has Thomas Lifson on or Rush mentions a recent dispatch from Michael Yon on their radio shows every once in a while I suspect most people do not take the time to read The American Thinker or Michael Yon on a daily basis. Big blog sites simply do not have the holding power like talk radio does.

Don’t get me wrong, there is an blog audience but it is not as influencial as is claimed.

All those questions about who stopped what, honestly it was talk radio.

The Left is successful because it has access to the biggest market: television.
Hey it helped Instapundit’s influence when he was on TV in 2004.

Back in 2001 I really believed the blog would revoluntionize communication unfortunately this just hasn’t happened. I have emailed out Michael Yon’s dispatches since he began writing but they fell on deaf eyes. I have email out AnySoldier.com over and again yet people still have yet to send out a single care package and this is after five years.

The main reason why blogs are not that influencial is because for the majority of Americans reading blogs takes way too much time and effort out of their daily lives.

Talk radio is still king. Unlike the blogosphere, talk radio is user friendly.
By Geoffb, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 10:29 am

syn said,
“Talk radio is still king. Unlike the blogosphere, talk radio is user friendly.”

I agree that Talk Radio is what brings these issues to a larger audience. I’ve been listening to various conservative talk radio shows since the mid 90’s and reading blogs since around ‘98. What I’ve seen is increasingly talk radio is getting it’s take on issues from the blogs. Not that talk radio hosts are changing their positions but that the blogs are bringing various ideas, ways of looking at events, ways of making arguments about issues to the attention of talk radio hosts. The radio then disseminates these to the larger audience.

On the conservative side these ideas are generated many times from comments on postings or from linkings to small even obscure blogs that are looking deep into one issue or event. Everybody is now a reporter/investigator/commentator. The best then filter up to the top and are then get promoted by radio to a larger audience. Rathergate started from a comment on Freerepublic about the font and LGF posting the image showing that the memos were made on Microsoft Word.

The left uses the top down method. Ideas, issues, ways of arguing are handed down from the elite to be used by the masses.

There was in the past year a study done about linkages on the internet. On the left the links all go up to a few sites that don’t link down to others. On the right it is more of a interlinked net where the links go both ways, both up to major sites and down to smaller ones.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/map-welcome-to-the-blogosphere
http://datamining.typepad.com/gallery/blog-map-gallery.html
By Gaius, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 10:34 am

I think that’s about right, Geoff. I know this blog got noticed after Hugh Hewitt was kind enough to link it several times - and he mentioned it on air several times as well. (And trust me, a Hewitt-alanche is enough to make the old hit counter scream for mercy.)
By Vmaximus, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 10:52 am

For me how it works is, I am at work, they track my internet time. I would love to read blogs all day, but I need a job. Fortunately I listen to talk radio all day. (and that is allowed) So I surf during the lunch hour, and when I get home. So for me blogs are influential in filling in the gaps and staying ahead of the curve.

Gaius, I have never listened to Hugh, (he is not on while I am at work) but I read his blog and found you that way.
By Gaius, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 10:58 am

I’m thankful to Hugh for the leg up.
By Geoffb, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 11:06 am

I know that in my own case that I’m always finding new blogs through links that are on sites I read now, either ones put up by the blogger or links in the comments.

I can’t say where I was told about your site but once I read and like one I bookmark it. Keeping bookmarks organized takes some time. I find that sites float up and down as far as how often I go to them based on my trust in their information veracity and just what issue is most impinging on my life at the time.
By syn, Friday, 26 October , 2007 @ 11:50 am

‘increasingly talk radio is getting it’s take on issues from blogs’

Most likely due to blogs increasingly replacing dead- tree newspapers as venues for gathering information. The main difference between dead-tree and blogs is that blogs do not have an editor to control output of information; this is the big influence blogs have over dissemination of information. In any case, similiar to the newspaper reader who reads only the first paragragh of a news report, most people who visit blogs simply scan the headlines for the interesting post they find relevent to their lives, read a couple of snarky comments or looks at links to U-Tube for that momentary entertainment. A click does not mean people are actually taking the time to read entire postings day after day. Plus blogs do not repeat the same message over and over like radio and tv does; if a blog reader misses two days of blog posts it take three days to catch up on the lost posts.

It is far easier and more entertaining to listen for three hours a day to radio than it is to spend three hours a day reading blogs (as was formerly the problem with dead-tree readers). The dominate readers of blogs are bloggers, most Americans are not reading blogs and if they do read a blog they were most likely influenced by talk radio to read a specific blog writing about a particular issue.

To claim that bloggers are the ones ‘who stopped’ this thing and the other thing is over-rated. The blogosphere is not user friendly, is hard to keep up with so many postings (bloggers depend on numerous postings through the day in order to increase the numbers of clicks which are used to justify advertising fees) and blogs consumes an enormous amount of time; the majority of Americans are not willing or are unable to spent the time needed to gather their information from blogs.

I suspect that most Americans have no idea of the riots which occurred in Amesterdam the last week and won’t until is is mentioned in a soundbyte on talk radio or perhaps a 30 second blip on cable news channels.

I’ve tried turning people on to the blogosphere using Instapundit because of his linking and the name easy to remember however when I would ask about their experience their response was typically ‘too much reading to get through’ and they tuned off from blogs. Blogs are not user-friendly.

Bloggers need to understand that the American audience has been conditioned to receive soundbyte information and out of all information outlets, blogging is the furthest thing from soundbytes.