Launched with much fanfare in 2005, Pajamas Media planned to harness the distributed power of dedicated bloggers to challenge the traditional news media. On March 31st, their blogging network will shut down, along with the ad revenues it channeled to conservative commentators. With the collapse of the blog advertising market, they've decided to focus their energy on the PajamasTV video network and its exclusive correspondents.
posted by verb on Jan 31, 2009 - 78 comments

Time Capsule: the internet and E-democracy. “Peoples’ lives now are as dependent on the Internet as they are on the basics like roads, energy supplies and running water. We can no longer take that for granted and we must advocate for the Internet politically, and support its vitality personally.” - Susan Crawford, University of Michigan School of Law. In recognition and memory of the beginning and continuation of the political internet, they have organized a Time Capsule of e-democracy's beginnings - everything from using e-mail to plead your friends to vote to flash animations that set the web alight. It is to be sealed on September 22. Help tell the story of internet politics.
posted by parmanparman on Sep 15, 2008 - 2 comments

A Lone Tibetan Voice, Intent on Speaking Out. Woeser (previously mentioned here) is a Tibetan writer and poet living under house arrest in Beijing, from where she blogs about the recent unrest in Tibet (there are English translations of her posts at China Digital Times). Last year she was awarded the Norwegian Authors Union Freedom of Expression Prize, but she was not allowed to travel to Oslo to collect the prize.
posted by homunculus on May 6, 2008 - 15 comments

An Indonesian TV crew was invited to Malaysia for their Visit Malaysia Year 2007 campaign but encountered many problems. They write up about it - and start a flurry of comments and controversy across the Malaysian government about blogging. [more inside]
posted by divabat on Apr 6, 2007 - 14 comments

Time magazine recently launched a new politics blog, Swampland. The blog is, to this point, most interesting for its confrontations between the commenters and the bloggers. [m.i.]
posted by ibmcginty on Jan 26, 2007 - 26 comments

$1,000 CDN ($880.80 US) reward for exposing anonymous blogger: A Prince Edward Island business owner wants to punish a person by breaking their anonymity. According to the CBC, the targets are PEI Liberal Party (peiliberal.blogspot.com) and The Guardian (theguardianpeca.blogspot.com). More info: Don't Sue
posted by boost ventilator on Apr 23, 2006 - 13 comments

Hussein Derakhshan [English site] is one of the leading voices of the Persian blogosphere. His blog [Persian site] manages to reach a wide audience in Iran despite being officially censored. Currently, he is fulfilling his dream of visiting Israel [Flickr pics] and breaking barriers in Israeli-Iranian relations. Lisa Goldman, his host in Israel writes about his visit in her blog, too. He is interviewed by the Israeli press in this Haaretz article. He has written "Democracy's Double Standard", an NYT op-ed piece, [bugmenot]. from Tel Aviv, and delivered a lecture on "Reform, Youth and Technology" at the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Oh yeah, he's also a MeFite.
posted by ori on Jan 31, 2006 - 19 comments

"House to Vote on Political Blogging Rules" How is this to be interpreted? What's yhe motivation behind this? Who would it help more, MoveOn , or Blogs for Bush, or whom else?
posted by celerystick on Nov 2, 2005 - 25 comments

Gawker bucks vs journalists' bucks. The idea of bloggers going pro, though a relatively new one, has been discussed for a few years now. With blogging being discussed in the same breath as mainstream journalism, especially since last year's election in which the two activities seemed to clash in a very public way, is it time to ask ourselves if blogging is or can be just another form of journalism with its own professional personalities and success-based pay rates?
posted by clevershark on May 11, 2005 - 13 comments

Take a Nobel economist who has devoted his career to studying the effect of social and political change on microeconomic theory. Combine with the most prolific legal scholar of the past half-century and federal judge with immeasurable influence on American jurisprudence. Add Moveable Type and a bit of technical help from our fearless leader, and you've got the Becker-Posner Blog, which debuts today.
posted by PrinceValium on Dec 5, 2004 - 14 comments

The Bloggers on the Bus: The New York Times Magazine on bloggers on the campaign trail, and what effect they may or may not have.
posted by mrbula on Sep 26, 2004 - 35 comments

While much of the blogging world has been ga-ga over getting into the Democratic National Convention, it's tough to find anything interesting going on among the convention bloggers (to their credit, go turn on CSPAN today and see for yourself how boring it is). While our own Jessamyn is there (here are profiles of everyone going), I've found the strange CNN/Technorati partnership to be the most useful thing. Technorati founder David Sifry is basically doing a metafilter of all convention blogs over on CNN as the daily blog roundup, highlighting the posts worth reading among the participants.
posted by mathowie on Jul 27, 2004 - 36 comments

Dem Blogs This community is filled with bloggers and I wondered if anyone had seen Maureen O'Dowd's take on how the Presidential Candidates are starting to use, for better or worse, "blogging" as a method to get their "message" across. ( Registration required )
posted by RubberHen on Aug 13, 2003 - 9 comments

The First Democratic Debates were last night, but you wouldn't know it from the media's coverage. Barely a story on CNN. Howard Dean stole the night, with over a hundred screaming supporters outside the debates. The only person there with supporters was the blogging Presidential Candidate. There were students there from U.C. Berkley, Washinton, Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky. All thanks to the power of blogspot, and meetup. Whether or not Dean gets the nomination, this will be a campaign for the history books. They'll be on c-span all day today.
posted by cjoh on May 4, 2003 - 67 comments

ABC's blog "The Note" suspends operations, citing lack of resources needed for war coverage, the blog's humorous style not being "the right national tonic," and this shocker: "We suspect that the amount of strictly political news — the kind of stuff that is the meat and starch of The Note — is likely to dramatically decrease in the coming days." GUH? Aren't blogs now more important than ever? Aren't politics now more important than ever? What message is being sent by the mainstream media here? (Via the indispensable Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post.)
posted by PrinceValium on Mar 11, 2003 - 10 comments

Anti-Idiotarian Coalition/United Blogging Nation? It seems all this talk of UN bias has has some bloggers so frustrated and angry that they feel it's time to band together as a political force, and the beginnings of a movement are taking shape. Legal actions, media attention, and even a full fledged political party are all ideas that have been bandied about. They already have a couple of legal eagles and prominent blogging figures offering services/resources. All they need now are t-shirts. Oh wait, they have those too. One Nation, under Blog...
posted by mikhail on May 2, 2002 - 15 comments