(Cross-posted at MyDD)
Yesterday I spent some time outlining what I think the three waves of liberal blog-sprawl will be: technological support, grassroots "how-to" guides, and institutional support.
With an eye towards making that second wave happen, I started an online book, called "How to Write a Local Political Blog", at http://www.plantingliberally.org/HowToBlog. The outline for the book is as follows:
- Getting Started - your own domain vs. a hosted server, Blogger vs. SoapBlox, etc.
- Where do you get information? - Local town newspapers, other blogs, city voterfiles and state campaign finance offices, etc.
- Building a readership base - using LeftyBlogs, "pushing" your blog to local journalists and candidates, etc.
- What makes a good blog post? - commentary on news articles, the rant, the snark, the candidate interview, etc.
- Developing a Community - using comments and posts, organizing "blogger's happy hour", etc.
- Making money from your blog - using BlogAds, selling T-shirts, setting up tip jars
- Advanced Blogging Technology - RSS syndication, trackbacks, taxonomies and folksonomies, etc.
Of course, all of this structure is up for debate. What I've put together is a loose outline of my thoughts based on a few years worth of reading blogs, a few months of writing my own local political blog, and some shooting-from-the-hip hypothesizing. Other people will no doubt have much better ideas and contributions to make.
If you want to help out with this effort, it's easy! Just register for an account, then click on one of the links above, or go to http://www.plantingliberally.org/HowToBlog. Click on the "edit" tab, and modify the text as you see fit. Or, at the bottom of the screen, click "add a child page" to any of the pages in the book in order to add another level of depth. From time to time I'll go through and clean it up a bit, make my own contributions, and so on.
I'm sure this project will be a pretty long-term effort, but I'm hoping that it'll be in decent-enough shape by the end of 2006.
Thanks in advance for your help!
