The Daily Background

I don’t know what other blogs my readers read, but I’d be willing to bet that you probably read a good deal of blogs in addition to this one- that’s just how the blogosphere is.

When I first got truly serious about blogging, or political blogging at least (it seems like it was ages ago now), I searched around for several sites that I decided I would check on a regular basis in order to stay up to date on what was going on. Just checking traditional media websites such as the front-page of the NYT, the WaPo, or CNN would give me the same basic types of news, political or otherwise, and not even a very comprehensive one at that. Not that I don’t check those or other traditional media websites, but the bulk of my news intake comes from other nontraditional sources, like blogs.

The list of websites that I chose back then has changed quite a bit. Some of the websites I only check occasionally, and some of them I’ve forgotten about all together. But, like the old cliche of the “test of time,” there are a handful of sites that put an immense amount of trust in, and still check on a daily basis.

One such blog is Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, more commonly referred to in the blogosphere as just “Political Wire.” I can remember finding Political Wire halfway down the blogroll of DailyKos during the 2004 election cycle. And I’ve been reading it pretty much every day ever since. It’s fair to say that I’m a fan.

For those of you unfamiliar with Political Wire, it is basically a site with political news briefs from all around the country, updated all day. Goddard will pull the most interesting, important, or overlooked bits of information out of articles published in hundreds of news sources, both traditional and nontraditional.

On an average weekday, there might be 15 or 20 posts. Some of them I find fascinating and never blog about (such as information about my home Congressional district NH-02), and others I’ll blog about and link to. But there are some sources that I don’t feel fully up to date without having read, and Political Wire is one of them. Recently, a sister site called Political Insider was also launched, and I’ve been reading it on a daily basis as well (RSS is a great technology, you know).

Political Wire isn’t overtly partisan, but I secretly think that Goddard is a progressive/liberal like myself (although to be fair, I’ve run across conservatives who read Political Wire as well and are convinced that Goddard either has no political leanings or is a secret Pat Buchanan fan or something).

As I’ve also said several times, I’m involved in a project called 2008 Race Tracker, which is a wiki started by the folks over at Swing State Project, and aims to catalog candidates for 2008 House and Senate races (you should really sign up and help out with that, by the way). I can’t tell you how many times I’ll be reading Political Wire, and find a juicy tidbit about a possible candidate announcing that they’ll be running, or speculation or rumors about a particular race, and I’ll rush over to 2K8RT to update the individual entry for that race with a link to Political Wire– only to find out that somebody’s beat me to it. (Posts like this one from today at Political Insider are a wealth of information for this type of thing.)

So, when Goddard asked for some reviews of Political Wire from bloggers, I couldn’t help responding to the request. Goddard also asked for a little advice, so I thought I’d offer some, although I’m hardly qualified to give advice to a Top-1000 blogger.

Political Wire doesn’t have a comments function, and I’d kind of like one. I know this would just make it “feel more like a regular old blog,” but I really like the ability to give instant feedback, or link the author to a related news article or blog post, or something like that. TPM Muckraker added a comments feature not long ago because it had been so heavily requested, and I’m pretty sure that its popularity has only increased since then.

ABC’s The Blotter didn’t always have comments either, but after a huge number of requests, they added that feature. It’s not a make or break type of thing, and I bet Goddard has considered adding comments in the past, but I think it’d add to the site.

There’s of course the fear that many popular websites have, that because they’re so big, trolls or spammers will come along and make comment threads unbearable for the average reader- and this is a legitimate concern. Individual Comment moderation can be a pain both for readers and webmasters, but I’d suggest that a limited commenting system like the one employed by Wonkette for instance might be a possible solution to that. National Journal’s publication Hotline on Call has a somewhat similar system.

Here’s another thing I’d like to see from Political Wire: a political calendar. I’ve tried my best to make my own modest calendar of upcoming political events and anticipated timeframes when candidates were likely to make their 2008 announcements, and other stuff like this, but I think it’d be extraordinarily useful if Goddard were to come up with a version for Political Wire.

Hmm, let’s see what else… Here’s a piece of advice: fix the typo at the top of the Winger’s aggregator page (Taegan will know what I’m talking about after a quick look… “blogospher” instead of “blogosphere”). I think that’s been there for kind of a while. I’m really hard strapped to come up with other advice. I think the addition of the “Digg This” link was a good idea, and more and more political blogs have been doing this lately. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much all I’ve got.

Anyways, definitely check out Political Wire if you haven’t (they have both RSS and email subscription, so that’s a big plus as well). I have no doubt that in another two years, I’ll still be reading it pretty much every day.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog