The Colorado Index

Ruminations

It has been a long time since we wrote a blogging hints essay.  We continue to learn the system.

1.  We continue to believe that it is almost a waste of time to blog if one does not blog daily.  Yes, it gets to be a drag but there isn't a lot of point to having a blog without regular readers, and intermittent bloggers don't get or keep a regular readership.

If you blog daily and have a viewpoint, others take you seriously.  You might not be able to shape events exactly as you might like, but you can impact them.  If you succeed in impacting them, you shouldn't write about the impact you believe you have made or you will undo your hard work.  There are exceptions to this "rule," for example when you might want to try to goad others into doing stupid stuff and don't really care what they do.

One of the best ways to impact others is to write about them and link what you wrote to something they, or their supporters have written.  Every blogger follows page hits backwards, and this almost guarantees that they will see your comments.

2.  This author has a love-hate relationship with Google Alerts.  It is both very useful, and at the same time not nearly as useful as it could be.  We often run into newspaper articles and blogging comments mentioning our alert subjects on which we got no alert.   Some of the stuff isn't useful, but much is.

In the course of trying to figure out what articles make the alert and what doesn't, we think that a writer must mention the subject's full name at least twice in the essay, at the very beginning, and again not more than three or four paragraphs deep.  The second mention is the one that is usually picked up. 

If a writer only mentions the target name once, Google alerts seems prone to miss the mention.  It may catch it singly when the target name is grouped among other names in a list.

3.  BNN can be a source of hits, though they never get referral credit.  If you write with BNN in mind, spread your posts out so that someone else posts between your posts.

Keep in mind that BNN quotes the first few lines, so don't be boring.

BNN has an influence ranking system that can be gamed quite easily and thus seems to be meaningless.  They weight links more heavily than clicks.  They don't count links from blogs that aren't on their list, so if a blog got linked by a national site, they appear to have no way of knowing it, or that it might be generating hundreds of hits.  Now, that's influence!

There appear to be two bloggers who have figured out that links are the key to being high in BNN influence and so they link each other every day.  It is fun to watch the gamesmanship, but we would guess that it doesn't buy either of them any more BNN eyeballs than if they just played it straight.

That's it for today.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow. We'll Blog Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning, I will be meeting with four gentlemen who are considering starting a blog.  I try not to go into meetings of that kind without handouts.  There isn't much that is secret about what I will tell them, and I thought it might be useful to put my newly written handout up on a post.  Sorry about the lack of links.

Starting a blog

Why you should blog:

1. Dems own the media and are very selective about what they report and how it is reported.

2. Dem millionaires are paying liberals to blog, and those blogs are intent on either destroying Republicans or trying to force the media into reporting issues their way. Big money is being spent to do this. Colorado Media Matters has 18 staffers. Colorado Confidential has an expensive Lexus-Nexus connection and 9 staffers who make a monthly “stipend” of $1500 a month, probably more considering that they just took on Jim Spenser

3. Blogs can be a means of communication among Republicans on issues and a mechanism for identifying and countering Democrat propaganda.

4. Blogs can directly influence campaigns, both Republican and Democrat.

Blog Subject:

1. You can help the Republican party by concentrating your attention on Democrats. Pick one Democrat or at most a small number and learn as much about him/them as possible. You will discover that he/they tell one audience one thing and another the opposite.

2. There are a small number of blogs that think they can be ideological enforcers for their wing of the party. They have a very small audience and little prospect of seeing it grow. Unless a Republican does something really stupid, like attacking another Republican or promoting a policy that doesn’t make sense, avoid writing negative things about him, or even positive things. Of course, what you may think is really dumb, others may love. If you want to become a blogging outcast, then use your blog to relentlessly attack other Republicans, and make those attacks as mindless as possible.

Writing Style

1. Keep it short. The entries on thecoloradoindex are invariably too long to hold the attention of lazy readers. Schaffer v Udall is designed to capture both thinking readers and lazy readers by keeping the entries short. If you must write a long essay on a subject to make your point, consider writing the long essay on a different blog and linking to it in a short blurb.

2. Go out of your way to be civil. NO ONE reads or likes material where name calling is used.

3. Pepper your writing with anecdotes and life experiences that support the point you are trying to make.

4. Don’t be monotone in your writing. Use humor. Change subjects or go at the same subject from a different angle.

5. Don’t be afraid to praise Democrat politicians when they do something right. It makes your writing more credible to independents; gives your other writing more of the moral high ground; and encourages the recipients of your praise to follow policies with which you agree.

6. Use spell checkers and remember that they do not check the spelling in the title.

Blogging has its downsides.

1. The audience, at least in the beginning, will be small.

2. To build an audience, you must be consistent, meaning that someone must write something every day. This suggests team blogging. There are no successful big time blogs that do not employ teams of bloggers that I know of.

3. Unless you toe certain lines, you can expect hear from the very small number of Neanderthals in the party. Each time they comment, they will use a different screen name to make their numbers appear bigger than the six to ten IP’s they use, and more geographically diverse than they are. Example: the same IP writer signed a comment “Laughing in Denver” and “Eastern Conservative” in comments spaced about a month apart. Some of what you get will be stomach turning, so consider not allowing comments. At the very least, moderate comments from the beginning.

Blogging has its upsides.

1. Politicians pay attention to blogs, more than you would guess. It is possible to write about something and see a change in the way things unfold and know that you had an impact (though you can’t usually write about it).

2. If you are seen as having impact, or are seen as willing to try to have a positive impact, you can expect to hear directly or indirectly from party heavyweights, and I am not talking about wannabe heavyweights.

3. Writing is therapeutic.

Blogging Services

1. Avoid using townhall.com. While it is free, it is very poorly executed. They make it impossible for potential readers to find blogs on their site. Their big name writers have blogrolls which don’t include (or didn’t the last time I checked) any townhall blogs, so if you want someone like Hugh Hewitt to read and write about your writing, put it anywhere but on townhall. More importantly, you cannot moderate comments.

2. Typepad. Not free. If you want multiple authors to be able to blog on your site, you have to pay $15 a month. Thecoloradoindex is a typepad blog and I can testify that it has some really annoying features, and some really good ones like delayed publishing. The most annoying feature is their time out system where you can be made to log in again as you try to save something you have spent two hours writing. Of course, the log in screen destroys your work. I’ve found work arounds but for $180/year, such an obvious annoyance should have been cleared up years ago.

3. Blogspot. Schaffer v Udall is on blogger. It, too, has some annoying features, but it is free. I’ve never set up a blog on blogger, and have only authored on it. It is slow to write on, as though every keystroke goes around the world before it hits your screen. You can’t easily cut and paste within the blog. Using inset is difficult because once in quote mode, it is hard to get out. There is a work around for that. Inset uses a carriage return at the end of each line which then looks dumb on the blog itself unless the blog format matches the length of the inset line. If it doesn’t, you must manually remove the carriage returns. The REALLY good feature is that it seems to allow unlimited authors. Its really bad feature is that it apparently doesn’t allow comments to be moderated.

If I were starting a new blog, I would likely go with Blogspot.

Advertising and other stuff:

1. If you write on politics and allow advertising, expect that some Democrat will buy up the ads on your site and you will be unable to control the content.

2. Getting a dot.com address is something you should do. If you don’t, and become successful, expect someone else to claim your dot.com and try to sell it to you or use it against you.

3. I prefer using a pen name. Don’t be so anonymous that you think your anonymity shields you from your own writing because it won‘t. Keep in mind that your writing might impose a legal liability on you, so take care what you write and how you write it.

4. Do not identify people on the net unless they are public figures already. Use common sense about email addresses, children’s names, addresses, etc.

5. Try to do original reporting.

6. A really good, but not foolproof source of material on your target(s) is Google Alerts with just the name and not the office of the target.

The reason for the title is that after people hear what is involved, they turn and run.  But maybe tomorrow will be different.

More Blogging Hints

It has been a while since we wrote a blogging hints essay.  One of the original purposes of this site was to provide usable hints for new bloggers.

Today's subject is about comments.

The bad news:  There are some interesting people out there who will write some interesting, nay offensive stuff if you allow them to do so.  This site seems to attract two kinds of comments and two kinds of commenters.

The first is the best kind, the folks who have interesting things to say and who say them in a thorough, thoughtful way.  These writers are very desirable and make a blogger's job much easier.  It makes for a more interesting blog if the folks who comment on your blog do not agree with your position, so long as they do so in an inoffensive way.  You will find that their comments actually allow you to sharpen your argument and fix any holes you may have left.  Treat them with respect.

The second kind of commenter is the intentionally offensive individual whose goal is to upset you and help you ruin your blog.  You can spot these folks very quickly.  They write very short comments and always sign their name with a pseudonym.  They try to make it appear that more than one individual is making negative comments by using a different pseudonym each time.  You can identify them simply by checking their IP address, if your software allows you to do that.

You can expect this latter set to be without much in the way of common decency or ethics.  They will sometimes pretend to be friendly, and at other times to be unfriendly.  They are trying to herd you into not saying what they don't like and if you publish their comment, to give the impression that you are doing something that you are not doing (attacking Republicans in our case). 

If they don't like your blog, they are trying to discourage you from posting at all. 

You must decide what you are willing to tolerate in the way of comments.  When this blog began, we allowed all comers to comment.  That continued until things got ugly.  We now moderate comments, and that seems to work well.  We could completely ban certain IP's from submitting even moderated comments, except that the hostile commenters provide a source of entertainment and sometimes become a foil for a good essay subject. 

New bloggers, especially those with thin skins, should consider banning a commenter after the first attempt at an offensive comment.

Once you have a good collection of comments from a single IP, you can make some telling judgments about their politics and ethics.  Left wing and fringe right commenters can be equally deceitful.  We once published a left wing comment, looked at the published version and immediately unpublished it.  The commenter had used her name as a link to an obnoxious piece of Democrat propaganda.  The fact that her name was a link wasn't obvious when reading the approval box. 

This blog would like to encourage Colorado Republicans from across the political spectrum to write blogs.  Our theory is that Republicans will need an alternate means of communication if they are to counter the liberal MSM.  We also think that moderates won't read conservative blogs and vice versa. 

If you are a moderate Republican, your blogging presence is welcomed, at least in this corner.  We wanted to forewarn you as to what you might expect and how to deal with it.  Conservatives are a bit safer from these kinds of comments but are equally strongly encouraged to start blogs. 

If, in 2008, there were 200 Colorado Republican blogs, across the spectrum, it wouldn't be too many.  Blogging is hard work, and it probably won't happen.

Odds and Ends, June 13, 2007

NBC's Brian Williams boldly and knowingly misled the public two nights ago.   

He noted that a three judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had declared that President Bush did not have the authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain a civilian who was taken from his home in Peoria, Ill.

He then made a big deal of the fact, and it is a fact that the judges on that circuit normally side with the government in these kinds of cases.  What he failed to mention was that the two judges who made up the majority in the 2-1 decision were Clinton appointees who have a different record. 

The government has notified the 4th Circuit that it will request a hearing en blanc, where it may see a very different outcome. 

When NBC decides that it can report the news in a way that would make the minister of propaganda of any totalitarian state proud, then we Americans need to call them on it.

If you want to be educated on this case, go to SCOTUSblog or to Powerline, though neither addresses the point we made.  Powerline has a second comment.

We've wanted to discuss a City Journal article on the impact of integrating illegals into American society for several days.  One of our regular readers pointed it out to us.  It would make great fodder for a long essay on the subject.  We don't have the time for that, so we will try to lay the article up against a template of history.

Without doing any research, we think that a similar article could have been written about the Irish in the 1860s, but they assimilated and many became Republicans.  The Chinese were the undesirables 20 years later, but they assimilated.  Southern Europeans were several steps below the Irish by the 1920's.

In 1960, there were very few Republicans who thought that people of the Catholic faith who would ever become Republican.  Forty years later, that prejudice has been undone, and undone in spades.  And who in that period would have guessed that the South would ever be Republican?

While Heather MacDonald throws up a lot of red meat in her article, she puts nothing she writes in a historic context earlier than 1988.  Immigration waves wash up on American shores in a historically regular pattern.  There is always huge outcry and fear for the American way of life from those whose families arrived a few generations earlier.  In the end, the immigrants are assimilated and a fair number become Republicans.  Those who don't often don't vote.

One point that Ms. MacDonald fails to address is that while the affiliation of Latinos was always lopsidedly in favor of Democrats in California, they weren't motivated to register and vote until Prop 187 came along. 

The vocal part of the Republican party is playing Russian roulette with the immigration issue by being venomously anti-immigrant.  If it hasn't done so already, it is on the verge of motivating so many potential alienated voters that it will go into a long period of decline if it loses.  The chamber with the bullet will roll around eventually.

And yes, we chose the word "alienated" knowing that it had a double meaning.

Enjoy Ms. MacDonald's article, but try to put it into a historical context.

Random Thoughts, June 5, 2007

OK, so June 5 has come and gone, and this essay is getting long in the tooth, but it is still relavent:

Ben Franklin was correct when he opined that guests are like fish.  He said more, but we will pass on the remainder.  The guests are gone and we have time for our other interests, including servicing this site.  It was hard to do when we were playing tour guide eight hours a day and then playing cards until midnight.  That is a killer schedule. (Just kidding about the fish, sis)

Catch-up:  This past week, Policy Media published two essays that we thought were well worth commenting on.  The first was Breaking News, Content is King 

Of course that’s not breaking news. But what is exciting is how that online content has evolved from the product of professional writers to semi-pro bloggers/ vidcasters. In this process, an interesting question arises: If content is king, then whose content wins - the professionals or the passionate?

Normally, we like to link to the sources we quote, but for the last two weeks, our time to do this site as professionally as we would like has been limited.  Here are two stats we have seen but can't find:  1) The internet has led to such a profusion of content that the amount of content contained in all of the volumes in the library of Congress is matched every 15 minutes.  2) The number of paid professional journalists is declining and stands at just over 50,000.

Not long ago we attended a meeting where it was speculated that the Rocky Mountain News would be gone in five years.  The Rocky won't disappear as long as the joint operating agreement with the Denver Post continues, but the speculation was that that may not happen.  As electronic media continues to supplant print media, the number of unemployed journalists will only increase.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, the professionally trained journalists may not have the skills to compete, as Policy media opined:

And often, the writers best suited to produce content online are those who were never trained for the old media.

These three observations are likely to be interconnected in a way that will give more influence to bloggers who are willing to do the work necessary to gain and retain an audience.  How much work is necessary?  We are guessing that it is at least two and may be as many as five years of steady blogging.

The other Policy Media essay caused us to think about where the wealth is going in this country.  The essay was More Positive Economic News.  The sentence that caught our attention was:

When the stocks go down, it's a very big deal and it's all the Republicans' fault. When the stocks go up, they only benefit rich Republicans and that's Republicans' fault too

Think about this for a few minutes:  How many Republican billionaires are there, and how many are politically active?  Is the rising stock market really benefiting "rich Republicans," or is it actually benefiting anti-capitalist Democrat politicians?  If it is the latter, how do Republicans proceed to educate the public that the Republican party is the party of the middle class while the Democrat party is the party of the economic elite?

Finally, an UGLY AMERICAN story to tell.  One of our visitors this past week was a Japanese foreign exchange student who just finished up her year.  The purpose of that program is to give foreign students an opportunity to see the best of America.  We can't do that when they meet Americans who go out of their way to insult them.

This week, one of our many tourist destinations was Seven Falls.  After a climb to the top of the falls, we took a short hike to another, small waterfall.  On the way, our high school age guest got ahead of us and stopped to wait.  As we came up, a father and his two children approached from the other direction.  In a tone that wasn't intended to be friendly, he said to her "In America we stand on the right side of the path."  Since she was dressed in American purchased clothes and wasn't speaking, we won't guess what might have prompted this man to think she wasn't American.

A large number of volunteers and educators had gone out of their way to make the student feel welcome and wanted.  Also, Colorado has a tourist economy.   It is in no one's interest that Americans mistreat either exchange students or tourists who come to visit and leave their money.   

A Note on Comments

For reasons beyond our control, we will be unable to approve comments for publication for about three weeks.

If you choose to leave a comment that you believe we would ordinarily publish, don't be discouraged by its failure to appear immediately.  It will eventually appear and we will bring it up in a future essay, so it won't be missed.

We will be publishing essays on issues that have traditionally not drawn comments, so many may not notice.

Summertime is Guest Time

Trying to do a site like this with daily commentary is a chore, as many of the bloggers we cover have discovered.

This past weekend was a good break from it.  It was an opportunity for the family to get together.  The cooking and the company were great while the blogging was set aside.

This upcoming week will see another set of family relations arrive with different expectations and a different (sightseeing) agenda.  The timing of the sweep might (almost certainly will) be impacted.  Our ability to monitor events and write on them will be impacted as well.

Thanks for your consideration.

For Your Reading Pleasure

Two subjects on which we have written were in the news today:

On immigration, State's Hispanic count on the march  from the Rocky Mountain News.

The 3.6 percent increase in Colorado's Hispanic population between 2005 and 2006 slightly outpaced the national Hispanic growth of 3.4 percent. Hispanics comprised 32,441 of the state's 90,082 new residents...

The Anglo population totaled 3,409,723, accounting for 71.7 percent of Coloradans last year.

However, it grew only 1.4 percent in 2005 and 2006...

As for political power, she said, "It's going to take a little bit longer. However, a whole new generation is being politicized that will change the politics in Colorado within the next decade."

And

Can't We All Just Get Along?  Dean Barnett, Townhall.com

There must be something in the water in right wing Blogistan. Maybe we’ve caught a touch of that “rage virus” that the important new movie “28 Weeks Later” documents...

One of the things I like about the right wing blogosphere, especially when compared to the left wing blogosphere, is the civility. We can disagree and remain cordial. None of us write in a style that could best be characterized as “angry.” We eschew name-calling, at least among ourselves...

And there’s one other thing, just speaking as one lonely blogger: I’m not into Action Alerts. I’m not into telling you how to protest something or telling you to call Congress

What is a blog good for if it doesn't make folks think?

Musings May 17, 2007

We got a verbal comment on our suggestion that the Republican Party would be better off to move the primary to June as a mechanism to heal the wounds in time to win the election.

The commenter pointed out that if the primary were moved to June, the assemblies and the caucuses would also have to be moved (or done away with which we are not proposing).

So they would, but wouldn't it be worth it if the result were more Republicans in statewide offices?

Pajamas Media had an insight into how our legal system is being used against us:

As thanks for stepping forward, Mansour has found himself a defendant in a wide-ranging defamation lawsuit, a lawsuit that has involved television and print media outlets, activist organizations, and individuals — anyone, it seemed, who had dared speak or repeat anything less than complimentary about the Islamic Society of Boston

What the Wahhabis had failed to do in Egypt, the exploitation of the American legal system threatens to do here — ruin the life of a moderate Muslim and anyone who stands with him.

Until the legal system decides to enforce its ethics provisions that supposedly prevent the filing of false lawsuits, but don't, we can expect it to continue to be used against the public, not just Muslims.  The quickest way to send a message is to begin disbarring the lawyers who bring and prosecute these suits.

A request:  This author doesn't know how to post a pdf document on typepad.  If anyone does know, please leave a comment which won't be published.

Musings and a Slight Change in Format

Due to the sparsity of Weekend posts by the blogs we cover, we will begin doing only a Weekend Sweep as of this weekend.  That sparsity is both a blessing and a curse.  It is a curse because readers get trained not to visit the blogs on the weekends.  We would like to see more activity, but we can't twist any arms.

It is a blessing because it relieves the pressure on us to be here at 2 p.m. every day, seven days a week to do the sweep.  Spring has sprung, and the wife has honey do's that seem endless.  Then there are the family commitments, and we always have a NEXT project.

OK, we admit it.  We do have a NEXT project that we are not ready to write about, yet.  It won't interfere with the index much, though it did this week.  We think it will prove useful to Republicans in ways that most can't imagine.

Actually, there are two NEXT projects, and they are somewhat intertwined.  One is an education project that came about totally by accident.  We discovered that it is possible, even easy to teach a pre schooler how to do math.  Their hand-eye coordination doesn't allow them to do it on paper, but they can do it in their head with no problem.

We know of a four year old (just turned four) who can add and subtract simple two digit numbers (i.e. 22 + 7 and 40 - 1).  He can also count into the hundreds (until he gets bored), and count from any negative number to any positive number.  Keep in mind that schools would like entering Kindergarteners to be able to count to 20, and this four year old is a year away from kindergarten.

We know of a six year old who is in kindergarten and impresses his sixth grade "buddies" when they visit his class by doing square roots of perfect squares up to 144.  He is mentally ready for third grade math (add, subtract, multiply, divide, understands the number line, word problems, and other skills) but still writes his 3's as m's, so he is doing OK in first grade math, where he belongs until his body catches up with his mind.

The two projects intersect also in that we want the older one to start to learn a sophisticated computer animation program, one that requires an understanding of spatial relationships.  This week we spent about an hour introducing him angles and the Cartesian coordinate system for that project.  He had no problem because he understands how negative numbers work, though he didn't know what they were good for.

Sometime in the next two or three months, we will teach him to graph out in three dimensions a ten second video animation of his name and execute that plan. The letters will jump and spin and shimmer and shake.  Projects like that make kids want to learn to do math and provide a very positive feedback mechanism.

We think it is possible to design a curriculum that will teach kids to do what these two are proving capable of doing (and animate it).  Right now, that project is in the thought stage.

Anyway, those projects got in the way of our intent to write a Sunday essay every Sunday this week and that might happen again next week.  Writing those is very time consuming and we always want to give the subject a chance to answer our questions.

This musings will have to do.