reach the common folk; reach the politicos; become a politic "party"; perpetuate ET through time;
All valid reasons for the effort and expense of creating and maintaining ET or any blog. The first two reasons are among the reasons why I put in as much time (pretty much all my spare time) as I do.
Which begs the question: what did the founder(s) of ET hope would happen. What did they hope to accomplish? Blogging takes on a variety of forms, which place themselves everywhere on the spectrum of serious to chatty.
As an example, dkos is a brilliant success. I know the kind of resources involved and their expense. Never mind the servers and the bandwidth involved (at my last serious job, we had a T1 line - serious, pro-grade bandwidth - which was running us just under $1000 US per month), dkos has retained an attorney, has a development staff, and at least one (who must be a full time employee) technical administrator. And lots of volunteers who put in lots of time, such as the rescue rangers and the tag librarians. So dkos has substantial backing from someone - my rough guess is that dkos burns through at least ten to fifteen thousand dollars a month. At least. I doubt their ad revenues cover half of that.
Anyone thinking of where he wants ET to go, if anywhere - maybe it has arrived - has lots to think about. Creating a major blog will eat up all the "owner's" time, cost lots of money, and involve many people (dozens? hundreds?) doing quality work together.
Or we could all just be chatty. It's not for me to say. I'm one of Jerome's "outsiders" who contributes infrequently and I don't foot the bills. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
And the annual Netroots Nation convention. A slick, professional effort. Who is behind that? There's no question about it. There's tons of effort in making dkos what it is.
Howard Dean? A consortium of progressive interest groups? George Soros even? It's actually an interesting question. I wonder if kos deals with this in his book. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
2008 was a good election year for us electorally, of course, but it was also a good year for this site. We easily broke $1 million in revenues, which have allowed us to do a bunch of cool new things: Professionalize. For a long time, Jeremy the tech dude was my only paid staff. As of now, Daily Kos has a paid staff of eight. SusanG is Executive Editor, BarbinMD is Associate Editor, Kagro is editor of Congress Matters, I have a business manager (Will), Brownsox will be a key part of a new project we'll be launching soon, Hunter is hard at work with DK4, and me and Jeremy round things off. The executive team (me, Susan, and Will) also share a new part-time assistant. On top of it all, Kos Media employees now get full benefits. That may seem trite or trivial for you guys, but for me, it's a huge accomplishments. Benefits are expensive.
Professionalize. For a long time, Jeremy the tech dude was my only paid staff. As of now, Daily Kos has a paid staff of eight. SusanG is Executive Editor, BarbinMD is Associate Editor, Kagro is editor of Congress Matters, I have a business manager (Will), Brownsox will be a key part of a new project we'll be launching soon, Hunter is hard at work with DK4, and me and Jeremy round things off. The executive team (me, Susan, and Will) also share a new part-time assistant. On top of it all, Kos Media employees now get full benefits. That may seem trite or trivial for you guys, but for me, it's a huge accomplishments. Benefits are expensive.
The figure I gave above didn't include such a big staff, maybe two or three including kos himself, but did contain payments on hardware (consider the archiving requirements!), bandwidth (I have no idea how much a T3 connection costs, lets say $2000 monthly and I'll bet my last dollar that's a really low figure), MySQL licensing (we paid $142,000 yearly for two big Oracle installations and of course they're not using the MySQL community edition), attorney's fees (dkos has been to court once already - kos won), and basic but unavoidable incidentals (like a graphic/web designer's bill).
So the figure I gave was for the old dkos, assuming it was watching it's burn rate closely and went lightly on the organizational frills, not the present dkos with the larger staff and I excluded Congress Matters entirely.
Let us as well consider just one item where ET would differ greatly from dkos: legal fees. Assuming ET is deliberately EU-wide, across countries whose slander and libel laws differ, ET might require some legal expertise that dkos did not. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
There was also an amazing court sentence last year in Modica that ruled blogs are the equivalent of newpapers and are therefore accountable as is a newspaper.It was a very adroit sentence since it did in no way affront what was actually produced on the blog- dossiers and documents alleging corruption and mafia ties- but seized and blacked out the site on purely normative grounds. The site- like all blogs- had not been duly registered as a news source. The case, I hope, should go to Europe.
Off the top of my head, there are a couple cases I've read about:
Verdammte scheisse! It's all too much for a layman! As I said before, operating a blog and contributing to one is worth thinking hard about. "It Can't Be Just About Us"--Frank Schnittger, ETian Extraordinaire
