From Chicago’s East Side — Blogging the Democratic Convention

One nice thing about receiving home delivery of the Boston Globe is that our carrier inserts it into a handy plastic bag which can be used to pick up dog poop. Too often, the packaging is far better than the contents, and the comparison is not much better after I’ve walked the dog. Today the newspaper featured an article on how the authorities at the Democratic convention are grappling with the issue of weblogs as legitimate press. It looks like they will be issuing some press credentials to some bloggers.

The article itself gets quotes from several bloggers — all of them lefties, including the execrable Daily Kos. There’s also somebody with a blog called Pandagon.net, which he claims has 12,000 hits per day. They must all be from his mother, since I’ve never heard of it. Jeff Jarvis, who seems to show up on most Top 100 lists, has about 4,800 on the average.

6 thoughts on “From Chicago’s East Side — Blogging the Democratic Convention”

  1. Hmm.. . Pandagon has a Sitemeter link that appears to confirm his 12k daily traffic.

    OTOH, I don’t know why he gets the attention. Look at this post, in which his co-blogger mocks a political scholar for having an American Enterprise Institute affiliation, and the scholar turns out to be the liberal Norman Ornstein. Or this one, in which he says conservatives are liars, and then goes out of his way to slander a conservative journalist.

  2. I saw the sitemeter, too, and began to wonder how to hack it. I’ll bet I could figure something out, maybe something a little more sophisticated than hitting the refresh button all day. Take a look at these statistics — the referring pages are all from his site. It’s like introducing his right hand as his girlfriend.

    That’s not being too cynical, is it?

  3. Isn’t that the ranking of entry rather than referring pages? If you look at our Sitemeter stats they look very similar. In both cases the blog’s home page is the most frequent entry page.

    I don’t think much of his blogging but I think his stats are legit.

  4. My bad. I was looking at the wrong report. It looks like most of his referrals come from Atrios. Maybe Atrios is his mother?

  5. Who cares about Pandaboy? The important bit in Mitch’s post is the revelation that the Boston Globe is actually good for something (I use the bags for the same purpose).

    One annoying bit about the article was the portrayal of ‘journalists’ as ‘professionals.’ What a load of crap. No one reserves seats at events for journalists because they’re ‘journalists’ or ‘professionals’ – they give ’em seats because whatever they like to call themselves, they have *readers*. And in that they’re no different than bloggers.

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