Planting Liberally

This week, Paul Benson posted an interesting diary at OpenLeft about supporting project groups on progressive blogs. The basic idea is fairly simple: quite often, progressive blog readers want to get together to collaborate on a project. Projects can range in nature and scope widely, and they can have a fixed goal (like producing a catching YouTube video) or an ongoing set of goals (like promoting progressive legislation). But they all seem to share on common characteristic: they are poorly served by the recommended diary section of most progressive blogs. Paul lists only two examples of projects that were successfully organized via diaries - YearlyKos and the Gannon investigation. There are probably a few more we could add to the pile, especially if we reached into the archives of local and statewide blogs, but I think the point stands. Blogs are a great way to share news and opinions and to incite activism; they are not a great way to organize activism.

Paul sketches out a quick-and-dirty example of what a progressive project organizing platform might look like, and I think it's a reasonable first start. There are certainly other online project management tools available, ranging from dotProject to 37 Signals's Basecamp. I would also add that Paul's critique only underscores a point I've been making here in recent weeks: that the progressive blogosphere could be exceptionally well-served by an open-source platform, especially one like Drupal.

There are a couple of Drupal modules which are particularly well-suited to the sort of project management Paul is referring to: Organic Groups and Project. The former allows any Drupal site to be subdivided into a number of workspaces for interest groups. The form of a workspace can itself be flexible - it can be a wiki, a blog, a document-sharing space, or a combination of all of these. The Project module is used to keep track of projects, subdivide them into tasks, and monitor the progress on each task, using a lightweight project-management paradigm. Project was written to support bug tracking for Drupal modules and themes, but it can also be adapted for other purposes. While I have not yet had the chance to incorporate them into the Drupal-based blogging platform I wrote about last week, it's clear that the ability to add these modules easily to any Drupal site is a major advantage to using Drupal to power a progressive blog.

There is also, I think, a larger point to be made about the use of open source software to power the progressive movement. There are many similarities between the progressive movement and most open source software project. They are both decentralized, made up of many independent actors with similar goals. It's no accident that they are both likely to run up against the same kind of collaborative challenges, which is, I think, yet another reason that the progressive movement should build upon the progress made by Drupal.

Last week I wrote a brief series on developing a Drupal-based progressive community blog platform. As a bit of background, Drupal is a leading open source content management system; at work, most of the websites I build use Drupal. In light of the vulnerabilities of the Soapblox platform, which hosts many local and some nationwide progressive blogs, it's become apparent that an open-source software packages, specifically tuned to the needs of progressive bloggers, would be a valuable asset.

The initial series last weekend got a fair amount of interest, but there was one theme that was fairly strong among the comments: Drupal is a great platform, but it's not user-friendly enough for most bloggers. There is, to be sure, some kernel of truth in that critique - Drupal is not that easy to use out-of-the-box. On the other hand, a savvy developer can turn Drupal into one of the most easy-to-use, powerful platforms for blogging around. If you have any doubts, I'd suggest you visit OnSugar and create a free account - the system is a hosted, Drupal-based blogging platform, and in my opinion it is at least as user-friendly as Wordpress, if not more so.

While I don't know if I'll ever be able to put together something as nice as OnSugar, I'd like to give it a shot. In the next few weeks, I hope to release a simple Drupal-based community blogging platform, which will include some (but not quite all) of the features many of us are already familiar with in most progressive community blogs. The platform will be released on drupal.org under the GNU General Public License, like all other Drupal contributions, so that others can download it and try it out. The hope is that this platform will improve over time, with the help of other progressive Drupal developers, progressive bloggers, readers, and anyone else who is interested. Below, I've outlined a prospective, best-case-scenario roadmap for this platform. I'd love to get feedback on this, so if you have critiques for the roadmap, if you'd like to help out - or if you're already working on a similar Drupal-based platform - please let me know!

Stage 1. Basic community platform

In this stage, we will develop a Drupal installation profile which contains the basic features needed for a progressive community blog. In particular, readers will be allowed to create new user accounts, and to comment and post their own blog posts using those accounts. Recent user blog posts will appear in a sidebar. Users will also be able to vote on one another's comments, and administrators will be allowed to front-page a diary or promote users to be front-pagers. One thing we might not include in this release is the ability to recommend diaries, and for recommended diaries to appear in their own sidebar block.

Stage 2. Platform enhancements

In this stage, we will make incremental improvements to the platform, in order to develop features which are similar to (or slightly better than) those of the basic Soapblox platform. These features will include recommended diaries (if they didn't make it into the first stage), user profiles and WYSIWYG editing. We will also include features that give administrators some options for tweaking the look-and-feel of their site, including specifying a color scheme, easily trying out new themes, and managing their sidebar blocks. At this stage, we may also consider adding functionality to allow bloggers to import their blog posts and comments from other platforms - like Blogspot, Soapblox, and Wordress - without much effort.

Stage 3. Hosted platform

Assuming that the platform has gained a toe-hold among progressive bloggers, we will begin to explore deploying the software on a hosted platform. The challenge at this point will be more of a business model challenge than a technical one - the question is how to finance hosting and software maintenance at a cost acceptable to most bloggers. One option is monthly fees, but it's possible that the fees required to maintain the system would be too high to be acceptable. Another option is dedicated advertising space, a percentage of merchandising sales, or some other shared-revenue approach, as I discussed last week. This stage will likely be a crucial one, in terms of making the platform widely accessible, as it will provide bloggers with a turnkey solution that lets them get a Drupal-based progressive community blog up and running with minimal effort.

Stage 4. Turbocharged community

At this stage, it will finally be possible to begin taking advantage of some of Drupal's more powerful community features. These include Open ID login; community calendars; lightweight intranet features that facilitate the work of committees or project teams; libraries of appropriately-licensed embeddable images and videos; polls and anonymized survey/data gathering tools. It would even be possible to add some e-activism features, similar to those at FireDogLake, and, if the appropriate state-level data is available, to create state-based e-activism tools. This stage would likely have several sub-stages; many of these features are uncharted waters for local blogs, and would require careful requirements gathering and testing before rollout.

Stage 5. Built-in financial stability

There are a number of ways in which Drupal can help bloggers earn more money, and this stage would focus on that problem. A DailyKos-like "advertising-free" subscription module would help bloggers earn dedicated revenue from a loyal customer base. Modules which automatically display "buy now" links on book reviews and similar posts could help bloggers earn more commissions from merchandising sales. More exotic possibilities are also available. For example, bloggers could write e-books and sell them directly from their site using Drupal's Ubercart module. Or, the system could integrate with Mochila, and allow bloggers to profit by reselling their work and even (with appropriate permission, profit-sharing, and so forth) their readers' diaries.

Again, if you have thoughts and suggested improvements for this roadmap, please drop a line in the comments! I'd also be interested to hear from developers who might be willing to help out, or who have already started building something similar.

Yesterday's post on the next steps forward, in light of Soapblox's near-meltdown, generated some very interesting suggestions and questions, and even a bit of a good old-fashioned programming language holy war, in the comment thread.  Alert reader Jon Pincus also pointed me to Pam Spaulding's very insightful thoughts about Soapblox.  Pam gets right to the heart of the matter in pointing out that the issue underlying this meltdown is money, or lack thereof.  Progressive bloggers aren't wealthy, and some of them failed to pay even Soapblox's reasonable monthly fees.

I do not think there will ever be a single, ideal blogging platform for all progressive bloggers, for the simple reason that each blogger will make her own decisions about where and when to post.  Soapblox may grow and thrive for a long time to come; I hope it does.  But I would also like to see the development of an alternative system that is every bit as easy to work with, and every bit as cheap, as Soapblox, but with a stronger technological foundation.  Ideally, I would like to see an alternative system that is more feature-rich, and capable of supporting the next wave of progressive organizing that is already beginning.

In particular, I believe that progressive Drupal developers will need to produce a "Dailykos-lite" version of Drupal, which makes it easy and cheap for progressive bloggers to start new blogs whose functionality imitates that of Dailykos.  Moreover, I think we will need to provide a turnkey solution for starting and hosting a Drupal-based Dailykos-lite blog with a reasonable monthly fee, similar to wordpress.com.  Using such a hypothetical solution, a progressive blogger would be able to do the following, at minimum: give front-page access to multiple bloggers, allow readers to post and recommend diaries in a sidebar, promote user diaries on a case-by-case basis, allow readers to rate one anothers comments, ban trolls, and add special sidebar features from time to time.  Such a system should be easy-to-use, and should require no more than a few minutes' setup time in order to get up and running.

The big question is, how will we pay for the development of such a system; even more tricky, how will we pay for the maintenance of the system?  Setting the development question aside, I think the maintenance question is one where there is some room to innovate.  Instead of using the monthly-fees model - reasonable though it may be - it might make sense to develop a hosted system in which a certain portion of advertising space is set aside for the hosting provider, and all revenue from that space is given to the hosting provider.  Other revenue-sharing models - e.g., some percentage of all affiliate or merchandising sales - are also possible, but this kind of model would ensure that, as long as people using the blogging platform, there is a steady stream of revenue available for keeping the platform afloat.

There are, incidentally, other opportunities lurking in the shadows of such agreements.  The hosting system could also provide help for bloggers who meed legal protection, it could develop a library of licensed artwork available for bloggers to use in their graphic designs and individual blog posts.  Or it might be possible for the hosting system to become a full-fledged support agency for bloggers, capable of licensing bloggers' writing for republication; arranging speaking engagements and book deals for popular bloggers; helping bloggers land consulting engagements; providing health insurance and other typical job benefits; and more.  Some of these ideas are a bit exotic or, to be honest, entirely unrealistic, given how little money is available to support blogging.  But I think it's important to remember that creating new opportunities for bloggers means more than just developing fancy software.

I'd love to hear more from progressive bloggers about what kinds of things they want or need out of a blogging platform.  Starting with the very basics, what kind of features - in addition to those listed above - do you need to go about day-to-day blogging?  How much are you willing to pay for those features, or, if you'd rather not pay, what kinds of blog platform business models are palatable to you?  What other forms of support could a robust platform provide?

This week Soapblox, the content management system and hosting platform of choice for many, many local progressive blogs, had a serious meltdown due to a massive hacker attack, and nearly collapsed. The attack on Soapblox immediately took down a huge chunk of the progressive blogosphere's infrastructure, and threatened catastrophe for the progressive movement, just as a new session of Congress and a new administration was getting started. The story was already covered ably at DailyKos, Open Left, and many other progressive blogs. The consensus that appears to have emerged after a fairly short but very wide-ranging discussion is: it may make sense to transition to another system eventually; for now there is no readily available alternative; Soapblox is a shoestring operation run by a good progressive; so progressives should chip in to save Soapblox.

My career is web development, so I naturally have a very keen interest in this story. If the progressive blogosphere was a single organization, if it could have anticipated its current needs a few years ago, and if it had asked me for an ideal platform to meet those needs, I almost certainly would have suggested a system based in Drupal, or perhaps multi-user Wordpress. Both are software packages that are more than capable of handling all of the sundry needs of most progressive bloggers, and actually quite a few more. Of course, the progressive blogosphere isn't a single organization, and even if it was it certainly couldn't have anticipated its current needs a few years ago, so I never had a chance to propose that kind of solution.

Instead of that scenario, Soapblox emerged, through an organic process that ranged over the past several years, as the platform of choice for many leading progressive blogs. Soapblox is a reasonably good technological platform, but I think the key to its success, until this week, was its low barrier to entry. For a low monthly fee and with very little technological expertise, a blogger could launch a full-featured blog that was felt, to readers, a lot like DailyKos. In contrast, Drupal and multi-user Wordpress would require an awful lot of tinkering and monkey-wrenching in order to simulate the Dailykos experience.

With Soapblox hanging by a thread, it's important to develop a new and stronger alternative to the old system. There's very little question, in my mind, that the best foundation for this kind of hosted blogging system will be Drupal, for a wide variety of reasons. First, Drupal's out-of-the-box features include user-specific diaries, moderated comments, and the capability to front-page a diary - those are all key features of Soapblox. What Drupal lacks is the ease-of-use of Soapblox, but as OnSugar demonstrated late last year, it's entirely possible to run a hosted, easy-to-use blogging platform on Drupal. Second, Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in the world, which means it has an enormous user, developer, and support community; there is no single point of failure in the Drupal community, meaning that a near-meltdown like Soapblox's is nearly unthinkable. Finally, there is already a considerable degree of cooperation between the Drupal and progressive communities. Many local Dean organizing groups, and later DFA chapters, developed websites based in Drupal, thanks largely to the release of a Drupal distribution called Deanspace, (which later changed its name to Civic Space Labs). Today, there are a variety of progressive Drupal development firms, including Development Seed, Chapter Three, Prometheus Labor, ZivTech, and my own company, Lightbulb First Consulting, LLC. Drupal is a community which is strongly based in a number of open source values, including meritocracy, transparency and accountability - the same values that drive the progressive blogosphere.

As with all crises, this one holds an opportunity to rebuild something which is not just as good as, but actually much better than, the old Soapblox platform. Drupal has, for a very long time, had extensions which provide robust, automated search engine automization (via the Pathauto and Global redirect modules); anonymous survey tools (via the Webform module); ecommerce tools (via the Ecommerce or Ubercart module, take your pick); calendaring features (via the Date and Calendar modules); and lightweight intranet features (via the Organic groups module). As of about a year ago, Drupal includes support for OpenID integration, meaning that a Drupal-based progressive blogging platform will lower the barriers of cross-blog cooperation, since it will be possible to allow readers of one blog to comment and post on another blog without creating a new account. Drupal will soon include support for semantic integration, meaning that progressive bloggers will be able to gather data sets and share them with one another easily. In short, the creation of a new Drupal-based blogging platform will make it possible to extend and expand the range of functionality available in progressive blogs in ways that are essentially unimaginable with Soapblox.

Primarily, I think it is the responsibility of the progressive Drupal community (which I count myself a part of), to answer this call-to-arms. We must develop a stronger, better alternative to the Soapblox platform, and we must properly productize and market that solution in order to make it palatable to progressive bloggers. These are busy days for me, and it's not entirely clear that I'll have time to develop such a product on my own, or to organize a larger effort. But I think we need to get the ball rolling very soon, because the days when it made sense to run the progressive blogosphere on a shoestring are long gone.

Full disclosure: My company offers Drupal-based web development services, and therefore is a competitor to Soapblox. We also worked on a small design project for Open Left about a year ago, and we submitted a business plan to the Blogpac entrepreneurship contest.

This is a quick "I told you so" hit. The NYT reports today that Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is having a huge impact on the WGA strike. This reminds me of a post I wrote back in April, arguing that progressives should create a network of industry blogs in order to sway "public opinion" within a given industry. At the time, I wrote that such blogs could help sway industry insiders on internal debates which have political overtones, like the open source vs. proprietary debate within the computer software industry. I also wrote about the need to start progressive workplace blogs, and even suggested that unions could start a fleet of such blogs as a way to identify workplaces where they might find a lot of support. (I since incorporated that idea into a series on using the internet to strengthen labor unions.)

Well, the upshot is that these posts turned out to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Industry insiders and workers are already creating industry and workplace blogs, and those blogs are already having an impact on labor disputes and internal industry debates. Welcome to 2003. Now, it's time for the progressive movement and labor movement to wise up to these online developments and begin harnessing them for progressive cultural change within the workforce.

Incidentally, unrelated to all of the above, I've recently started using Google Docs to write my blog posts. The resulting HTML is a bit clunky when I copy into MyDD, and I can't figure out how to tag my posts, but otherwise, I'm loving it. Thanks to my former DL co-host Baratunde Thurston (who himself swiped it from Todd Plants, who in an odd twist was a college roommate of mine) for the idea.

Update: And just like that, Devilstower at DailyKos starts blogging about the alternative auto industry. Gosh I love the blogosphere.

A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the Media Matters report on conservative dominance of newspaper op-ed pages. At the time, I wrote that it could be possible for a liberal entrepreneur to establish an op-ed syndicate for progressive writers which competes with the titans of the opinion industry - Washington Post Writers Group, Tribune Media Service, and Creators Syndicate. A progressive opinion syndicate could succeed by offering fresh and diverse voices, integrating social web technology with its offerings, tapping the variety of the blogosphere to package localized and national voices, and offering competitive prices. At the heart of the Media Matters report, and crucial to establishing the viability of a liberal opinion syndicate, is the question of why conservatives dominate op-ed pages. There are a few competing theories. One theory holds that conservative dominance reflects the bias of newspaper owners; another theory suggests that a broad but right-leaning section of the population, like advertisers, newspaper subscribers, or conservative movement activists, pressures the papers to publish conservative writers; another suggests that the large syndicates, who distribute most of the large opinion columns, offer preferential treatment to conservatives. Perhaps the most nuanced explanation I've seen was in the comment threads, where carter1 offered a three-part explanation which encompasses a number of different trends. I recently found a very interesting resource which might help evaluate some of these theories (h/t to John Palfrey at the Berkman Center.) The Center for Public Integrity maintains an online website which cross-references media ownership records with campaign finance records, called MediaTracker. By typing in your zip code or city and state in the search form on the front page, you can discover which companies own the media in area - including TV, radio, cable, broadband and newspapers. What's more, those companies are cross-referenced with campaign finance records, to give us some idea of the ideological bias of the media owners. For example, here's the political influence of Clear Channel - unsurprisingly, employees and PACs of the company contribute much more to Republicans than to Democrats (nearly 70% to Republicans, and 30% to Democrats). Unfortunately, neither Media Matters nor MediaTracker expose their raw data, so it's difficult to evaluate, in a systematic way, whether or not conservative ownership is correlated with conservative opinion pages. Still, it's possible to get a snapshot of some media markets. Regardless of the cause of conservative bias in op-ed pages, I'm still curious about, the possibility of establishing a progressive op-ed syndicate. Such a syndicate could do a great deal to strengthen the progressive movement. With the density of national, regional, and local progressive blogs, it should be easy to find writers who can be syndicated, and to market those voices to newspapers. That kind of business model would not only help distribute liberal opinions into new and larger markets, it would also help sustain some progressive blogs. Furthermore, it would require relatively little start-up capital, and it's something which an enterprising progressive could (it seems) easily get off the ground. This idea is hardly earth-shattering; in fact, it's more or less obvious, and I'm a bit surprised that a blog-based op-ed syndicate doesn't exist. That makes me wonder whether there's an obvious reason why such a business might fail, or whether it's simply never been tried. Could a progressive opinion syndicate be a viable business? What are some of the potential roadblocks, and how could they be overcome? Is this a disastrous idea that could never fly? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Jeff Jarvis wrote a pretty useless piece on the debate over blogger unionization at the Guardian today. I asked him to pretty please stop bloviating and start thinking in the comments on BuzzMachine. I find this subject utterly fascinating, from both a legal and an economic point of view, and the people who are paid to write about it seem to be totally unable to see the complexity. More to come!

This weekend, I'm writing a series on Supporting the Blogosphere. The idea is to discuss, in some detail, what needs to be done to support bloggers, and how it can be done. This idea was spurred, in part, by Mike Lux's piece on connecting donors and bloggers on Open Left, which theorized that bloggers need more supportive organizations in order to have a shot at collecting money from donors. Part 1 of the series focused on services for bloggers - goods, services, know-how, resources, and other things which support bloggers. Part 3 of the series will focus on a variety of organizational models which can be used to deliver blogosphere support. This post will focus on revenue for bloggers: how bloggers can make money through their blogs, and how a blogosphere support organization could assist them in doing so. I've written about making blogging profitable before, and there will be some overlap with that previous post - but today, I'll focus more sharply on how blogosphere support organizations can help bloggers in pursuing these profit opportunities. I'm flying dark a little bit in this post - I've never used my blogging for revenue, so there could be parts of this post that are in error. If you're a blogger with a bit more experience in any of these matters, correct me below, and I'll update accordingly. Advertising The most obvious form of blogger revenue, and the form which is probably most common throughout the blogosphere, is advertising. Putting advertising on your site, like blogging itself, seems easy at first, but is much more difficult in practice. First, there is the question of which advertising provider to use: BlogAds, Google Ads, or some other party? Next comes the question of how much to charge for ads. Finally, there's the question of where to place the ads on the blog, and how many to display at any one time. Bloggers could use help with all of these questions, and a blogosphere support organization can provide assistance along these lines. In particular, there appears to be some enthusiasm among bloggers for creating an organization to fix blogging rates at a certain level, in order to avoid a "race to the bottom". Depending on how that's done, it could very well be an illegal cartel, as a MyDD commenter (sorry, can't find the link) has pointed out. I imagine there are ways to get around that problem, though. For example, progressive bloggers could form a competitor to BlogAds, which provides advertising broker services; the broker could simply set a higher floor for advertising rates, and bloggers would be individually free to join or leave it as they see fit. I've harped on this idea a couple of times, and I certainly think there's room for a progressive competitor to BlogAds to emerge; there are any number of opportunities such a competitor could exploit. Another advertising problem that a blogosphere support organization could tackle is expanding the advertising base, in any number of ways. For example, such an organization could seek to help bloggers solicit ads among local retail businesses; or it could encourage progressive businesses, organizations, and candidates to advertise on progressive blogs. Alternatively, it could provide bloggers with mentorship and how-to guides as they form their own internal "advertising department". Along similar lines, such an organization could help form ties between local newspapers and local bloggers, whereby newspapers act as advertising brokers for local retailers, and bloggers act as low-cost publishers for those ads (I've kicked this concept around before, and there's real money in it - something like $7.5 billion, this year alone). Furthermore, a blogosphere support organization could help bloggers deal with the "drought" problem - that is, the problem that advertising revenues dry up in off-years. This problem is an accute one within the progressive blogosphere, as off-years - that's the time when candidates and organizations are least likely to spend advertising revenue, which means bloggers spend the time in desparate pursuit of revenue. It's also the best time for the blogosphere to strategize, regroup, plan for upcoming challenges, and assist elected allies in governance. The drought problem means that we are regularly losing important opportunities due to an unfortunate turn of economics. Beyond simply expanding the advertising base to eliminate this problem entirely, a blogosphere support organization can play any number of financial games to reduce the problem - e.g., holding some percent of election year blog revenues in escrow; helping bloggers adjust ad rates appropriately during election season to prepare for lean times; etc. Finally, a blogosphere support organization can assist bloggers by expanding the kinds of advertising opportunities available to them. These opportunities include cost per action advertising, which I wrote about in June; user-based advertising; sponsored blog posts (aka "post per pay", which is reviled in some quarters); and so on. Such an organization can also help bloggers put together attractive packge deals, tying together (for example) radio, newspaper, and blog ads, using Google Radio Ads and Google Print Ads. In some cases, expanding these opportunities means developing new software, and/or making that software more easily accessible to bloggers; in other, it's merely a matter of creating an advertising product and targeting it to advertisers appropriately. Speaking engagements and media appearances Popular progressive bloggers are interesting personalities. Almost by definition, they have an interesting, fresh voice; they are outgoing; they have a following; and, contrary to establishment lore, they are usually not trolls who live in their parents' basements, emerging only occasionally for Cheetos and Dr. Pepper. In short, they have the potential to be excellent public speakers and media personalities. Not all bloggers, but certainly quite a few. For the most part, this potential goes largely untapped. Bloggers are rarely invited to speak or appear at high-profile occasions or on widely-circulated TV shows. This potential is changing around the margins, certainly: blogger conferences and progressive conferences regularly feature bloggers as speakers; very popular bloggers do make high-profile public appearances occasionally; and, I would suspect, that statewide progressive bloggers are finding their way onto local news shows (I know that's happening in Massachusetts, for example.) However, there's potential for a much wider range of speaking appearances, including college lectures, campaign or union rallies, TV talk shows, radio talk shows, and progressive business gatherings. In some cases, these missed opportunities which could go to progressive bloggers mean lost revenue, in the form of missed honoraria; in others, they mean indirect lost revenue, in the form of traffic which could be, but is not, generated to the bloggers site. In many cases, these missed opportunities are also problems for the progressive movement as a whole, because they mean missed opportunities to disseminate our ideas. Blogosphere support organizations can work to tap this potential for speaking opportunities in a number of ways. The idea discussed most frequently for attacking this problem is a speaker's bureau, such as the Blue America Speakers Bureau. Such an organization represents speakers, and helps advertise their speaking services to a variety of venues, usually in exchange for a flat fee or commission. While a full-blown speakers bureau might be difficult or costly to establish, there are other angles on this problem: for example, progressives could form alumni networks which assist bloggers in locating speaking positions at their alma mater. Or progressives could establish a general purpose "speaking engagements and media clips library", which helps bloggers (and other progressive leaders, for that matter) to keep track of their previous speaking engagement and recorded media clips; such a library could be invaluable in proving a blogger's bona fides for future appearances. On the other side of the problem, a blogosphere support organization could provide bloggers with speech and media coaching, helping individuals make the most of the appearances that they do find. Blogger-for-Hire Blogger-for-Hire is the way I refer to somewhat rare cases where bloggers solicit donations in order to help them cover the cost of reporting on some event; classic examples include Josh Marshal's reporting on the NH Democratic Presidential primary in 2004, FireDogLake's reporting on the Libby Trial, and Matt Stoller's reporting on the CT Democratic Senate primary in 2006. I actually don't think there's much to do for blogger support organizations in helping bloggers work out blogger-for-hire arrangements; these cases are fairly rare, and bloggers have been able to use makeshift tools like Paypal successfully when they needed them. However, it is possible that a support organization could formalize the situation somewhat, protecting the blogger's liability, for example; or the support organization could assist bloggers in promoting one another's blogger-for-hire efforts. Another, perhaps more fanciful, possibility is that a support organization could support large-scale blogger-for-hire operations. For example, such an organization could help a group of bloggers work together to hire ten or so reporters, with each one assigned to the beat on each of the Republican presidential candidates' campaigns for the duration of the 2008 campaign. The blogs would then have access to the primary reporting materials, and the reporters' daily written accounts of events on the campaign trail. Consulting Consulting is the "gold mine" of progressive blogging - it's the opportunity most likely to help a blogger support herself full-time. Consulting opportunities for progressive bloggers tend to go in one of three directions: paid blogging for a candidate or organization; consulting on a variety of technical issues related to blogging, e.g., launching a new blog, doing design work, etc.; and strategic consulting on reaching out to the blogosphere, engaging with the progressive movement, etc. There are a variety of opportunities for blogosphere support organizations in this arena. Support organizations can encourage bloggers to take up consulting, and can help them find consulting engagements; they can assist bloggers with the myriad mechanical problems of starting and operating a business - legal needs, accounting needs, etc.; they can help bloggers identify and pursue new business opportunities; and they can connect bloggers with one another and with other progressive consultants and entrepreneurs, thereby forming a mentorship network. (My company's entry into the BlogPAC entrepreneur contest was along these lines, for what it's worth - we proposed a matchmaking service for progressive freelancers and local and state house progressive campaigns.) Consulting is an interesting revenue stream, because a successful consultant/blogger doesn't need a particularly large audience in order to build a good consulting business. She just needs a well-targeted audience who trusts her and accepts her authority, and she needs to encourage her audience to engage her services. In fact, bloggers who can dominate a particular niche might be the most likely to capture related consulting opportunities. For example, a blogger who is considered authoritative on bicycle-friendly policies in the Boston area might be the most likely candidate to gain a consulting engagement with a company that wishes to market its products to Boston bicyclists. Such a blogger would not need a particularly large audience, just one large enough to spread the word within the Boston bicyclist community about her expertise. Consequently, a blogosphere support organization which identifies topics where the progressive blogosphere doesn't have particularly good coverage, and which recruits a blogger to cover that area, could be well-suited to help the blogger provide related consulting engagements. For the most part, consulting as a method of supporting full-time bloggers is still a bit of a pipe dream. There are probably a very small number of consulting engagements awarded to bloggers on the basis of their blogging, and most of these are probably reserved for the most popular bloggers. It remains to be seen whether supporting consultant/bloggers is really an idea worthy of major investment. Information stream consulting Information stream consulting is a special case of consulting which I think every good blogger is capable of doing, and doing very well, and which very few bloggers consider a marketable commodity. That's a real shame, and I'd like to see it change, somehow or another. Information streams are both the raw materials, and the products, of blogging. Information streams consist of RSS feeds; email lists; newspaper stories; periodically-published reports by advocacy groups; voterfiles, birth registers, and other sets of public documents; and any number of other occasionally-updated sources of information. Every imaginable topic, no matter how small, has a potentially enormous set of information streams. Good bloggers will locate the information streams relevant to their topic area, separate the good streams from the bad, and will quickly identify those streams which are most likely to be the source of good blog posts. There are a variety of technological tools for doing that, including blog readers and email filtering (which allows a blogger to efficiently subscribe to dozens or hundreds of email lists). New tools, like Yahoo Pipes and Google Trends, are adding entirely new dimensions to this technological toolbox. My guess is that progressive bloggers, as a whole, haven't really grasped the power of these tools yet. Regardless, the point is that good bloggers are experts in information streams, and that this expertise can be put to use in a variety of ways by progressive clients. Information stream consulting can be a good way of doing opposition research, or efficiently discovering weaknesses in an opposition canadidate's campaign. It can be a good way for businesses to find new clients. It can help legislators identify new trends and ideas which are relevant to public policy. In some ways, this idea is very old. Consider the simple example of advertisements that comes in a change of address form booklet from the post office. These advertisements are there because someone realized that the information stream of "people filling out post office change of address forms" was very valuable to certain retail businesses (like hardware stores, furniture stores, etc.), and encouraged those stores to advertise in the booklet. Along similar lines, I once heard a Democratic party activist explain, at a public workshop, how her town committee checks the voterfile every month for new 18-year-old registrants, and sends them a post card encouraging them to join the committee. There has recently been an explosion in the number of information streams available, and I think many companies and non-profits are slow to catch on. I also think bloggers, although they tend to be experts in information streams, don't realize how valuable their expertise potentially is. A blogosphere support organization could set about fixing this problem, on both sides: encouraging bloggers to enlist as information stream consultants, and encouraging progressive businesses, campaigns, organizations, and other entities to hire this new class of consultants. This is a rather abstract idea, and one which is foreign to many organizations, so I imagine that drumming up clients would be the most difficult task. Fortunately, I think there are some information streams whose usefulness is obvious and easily grasped (for example, the case of 18-year-olds in the voterfile), and I imagine that would be a good place to start with the advertising. Coming up next... This post and my previous post, on services for bloggers, have together suggested an enormous laundry list of tasks for blogosphere support organizations. There is no way any one organization could tackle all of these tasks. It's possible that some of these tasks are really bad ideas which don't even deserve to be tackled at all. In the next post, I'll discuss the kinds of institutional resources we will need to tackle some of these tasks, and how such institutions could be created, assuming that there are founders with sufficient interest to do so. I'm under no illusions that most, or event a significant number, of these ideas will be enshrined in sustainable organizations any time soon, but I hope to inspire bloggers and entrepreneurs to think seriously about what their role could be in turning some of these ideas into reality.

This week, there's been a raging conversation on kid oakland's Blogs United group about what can be done to support progressive bloggers. The conversation was begun when I posted a quick email about Mike Lux's post about connecting bloggers and donors on OpenLeft; I think the conversation snowballed from there, partly because of Blogpac's infrastructure contest, and partly because of the excitement around YearlyKos. In any case, this weekend I'd like to bring this conversation to a wider forum, and explore it in a bit more detail. Over the course of three posts, I'll discuss the kinds of things that can be done to support the blogosphere. This post will discuss the kinds of services and benefits that can be provided to progressive bloggers; the next post will discuss the services which bloggers can provide to third parties, in order to make money; and the last post will discuss the various types of organizational structures which can be used to deliver benefits and/or help bloggers sell their services. Along the way, I'd certainly appreciate your thoughts; and if there are any bloggers in the house, I'd like to hear how realistic all of this is, and what can be done to make it happen. Without further ado, I bring you Part 1: Services for Bloggers The Costs of Blogging Writing a blog, on the face of things, is not very difficult. You fire up your web browser, log in, click "Write a new post", type an engaging and ground-breaking missive, click submit, and voila! Reader appreciation in spades. In fact, as any blogger who aspires even to a modest-sized readership knows, life is considerably more complicated. To begin with, there are the technical choices (and associated costs) of which blogging platform to choose, and where and how to install it. Then there are the strategic choices of audience targeting, and where and how to promote your blog (and the costs of promotion). Furthermore, there are ongoing editorial choices - what to write about, how often, how to cover the topic, and on and on. Added to these costs are hidden costs, which grow or shrink depending on the blogger's personal circumstances and chosen topic area. If you don't already own a computer and have Internet access, you need to make some fairly heavy equipment purchases, and pay high Internet subscription costs. If you tend to write about obscure topics, you may need access to Lexis/Nexis or a similar information service. If you play a media watchdog role, you're probably buying a fair number of newspaper or magazine subscriptions, and maybe purchasing a bunch of books. If you liveblog important political events, you're probably paying a cable subscription, travel costs, and/or conference registrations. If you are blogging full-time, or your blogging precludes you from taking a job with benefits, then you're paying your own health insurance, and not receiving benefits like contributions to a pension or 401(k) fund. Finally, there is the most important variable: time. There's time you donate to your own blog and (if you're managing a group blog) the time of your associates, which may or may not be donated. Writing time is the highest cost of writing a blog, and it frequently goes unreimbursed. Blogger and Blogosphere Support The easiest way to provide services for bloggers is to help bloggers pay for some or all of these costs, through direct reimbursement, bulk-purchase discounts, or some other avenue. To give you an idea of how this would work, a very simple blogger support organization could work as follows: bloggers sign up for membership in the organization, and pay a small yearly membership fee. The organization, in turn, purchases a lot of magazine subscriptions, and lets members choose to receive a fixed number of subscriptions. The organization's main role is to be a bulk purchaser, which reduces per-subscription costs for bloggers. A similar model could be used to purchase health insurance, Internet hosting provider services, and so on. The model could be tweaked in various other ways: for example, with sufficient support from big donors, benefits could be provided to bloggers for free, if bloggers meet some criteria. Another mechanism for supporting bloggers is to give them free or reduced-cost professional services, such as web development, graphic design, accounting, legal services, etc. In additional to the usual payment models for professional services (dues from bloggers, donations from big donors), professional services could be provided on a volunteer basis. For example, blog readers could volunteer to provide their professional talents to blog writers on an ad hoc basis. Alternatively, bloggers could trade services with one another, using a barter model. The cottage industry of open source blogging software, content management software, and blogging templates is another good example of an avenue in which professional services (web development or web design) are provided to bloggers on a volunteer basis. Alongside goods and services, bloggers sometimes need advice or mentorship, and this need presents another possible kind of support. A blogger support organization could provide bloggers assistance in making technical, strategic, or editorial choices. A "blogger school", blogger resource guide, or a similar kind of service could help bloggers make technical decisions about their blogs; or it could help them focus on a topic or learn more about that topic, in order to write better posts; or it could help them maximize the revenue from their blogs. Leaving aside goods and services with monetary value, bloggers frequently need access to political events or personalities. Most frequently, this is expressed in blogger circles as the need for press passes to some event or another; and fortunately, there is a slow but steady trend towards extending press passes to bloggers at conventions and other Democratic political events. But access goes deeper than that too - it includes opportunities to interview candidates and officials, solicitations of feedback on strategic plans, etc. It would be nice to think that left-leaning politicians and organizations will eventually come around to granting this kind of access to bloggers. Realistically, though, bloggers will probably need an organization which can advocate for them, and steadily work on finding a seat at the table for bloggers. In a way, this is what BlogPAC is doing, in certain targeted ways (especially with regards to net neutrality.) YearlyKos, by soliciting visits from Democratic luminaries, is also working to give bloggers a seat at the table. Access is a nebulous concept, and there's plenty of room for many different organizations to help bloggers gain it. There is a final category of supporting organizations which would be better described as blogosphere support, rather than blogger support: organizations which work to strengthen the blogosphere as a whole, rather than individual bloggers. Such organizations identify gaps in the progressive blogosphere, and work to fill them. That includes locating individuals who have something to say and encouraging them to blog; finding issues, geographic areas, media institutions, or other niches which aren't well covered by the blogosphere, and recruiting someone to do so; identifying other blogospheres with which the progressive blogosphere should interact, and building bridges between the spheres; and so on. There's tons of work which needs to be done along these lines; unfortunately, it is probably the most difficult work in this area, and the work which is least likely to be self-sustaining. Coming up next... This post has mostly focused on the kinds of things which need to be done to support bloggers and the blogosphere. For the most part, I've intentionally avoided mentioning, from a mechanical/organizational point of view, how this would be done. That discussion will have to wait for the third post in this series. However, rest assured that there's plenty of work to go around; I imagine that there's room for a few dozen blogger/blogosphere support organizations, with a variety of organizational structures, revenue models, and benefit profiles. In the next post, I'll discuss the different kinds of revenue available to bloggers, and the kinds of services bloggers can offer to make money. This is very relevant to blogger support, because one way organizations can support bloggers is to help them find customers, and/or make earning revenue easier. In the meantime, please chime in below and suggest other ways in which blogger/blogosphere support organizations could provide goods and services which would support bloggers. If you are a blogger yourself, perhaps you can answer this question: what are your most pressing needs, and how could a support organization help you meet them?

Today is the Fourth Annual Blogosphere Day, when the progressive blogosphere unites behind a single candidate or cause. This year, we're celebrating ActBlue, one of the most important elements of our electoral machinery. ActBlue helps Democratic candidates raise money, and it helps grassroots activists organize their own small-dollar fundraising campaigns. ActBlue is also an excellent example of what liberal entrepreneurship can do for the progressive movement. Started in 2004 on a shoestring budget, the organization has helped raise $25 million for Democratic candidates in three short years, with a miniscule up-front investment. Drop by ActBlue today and show your appreciation for this wonderful organization!