Half Changed World

Alison asked me what political blogs I like.  That’s a harder question to answer than it seems.

A short answer is provided by my bloglines subscriptions.  As you’ll see, there’s a lot of blogs there, and no, I don’t read all of them every day — nowhere near that.  But these were all ones that I liked enough to think that I’d want to find them again, and the easiest way to do that is to add them to my subscriptions.

But, of all those blogs, which ones are political?  That’s hard to answer.  Majikthise and Pandagon were both finalists for Koufax awards last year.  But what about Bitch, PhD?  Does the fact that she sometimes tells cute kid stories make her less of a political blogger?  For that matter, what about me?  I don’t generally think of myself as a political blogger, because I write about a lot of things, but I’ve been interviewed by two different academics studying political bloggers, and was invited to participate on Gather’s election 2006 group. 

I tend to prefer bloggers who mix the personal and the political to those who are all politics all the time.  For one thing, I think it dramatically reduces the level of flaming — when you think of the words on the screen as coming from a real person who gets frustrated with their kids and likes to watch trashy tv, you’re less likely to tell them they’re a moron.  For another, the volume of postings tends to be more managable.

I may lose my blogger credential for saying this, but I think that for most national political issues, the much maligned mainstream media generally does a better job of covering things than bloggers do.  Where blogs shine are the issues and races that get overlooked by the mainstream media.  So I love reading Not Larry Sabato who covers Virginia politics down to the delegate and state senate level.  The now defunct Democracy for Virginia used to highlight specific bills.  Nathan Newman writes about labor issues.

For the high volume political blogs, I mostly depend on others to point out the most interesting posts.  I usually only read Kevin Drum or Matthew Yglesias when Laura at 11d sends me over to them, but then I almost always find something else there that’s interesting.  TAPPED and inclusionist are other blogs that often point me to interesting content elsewhere. 

It’s worth noting that the biggest "political blogs" aren’t exactly blogs.  They’re community sites, like DailyKos and MyDD.  I generally don’t read these unless someone points me to a specific post, because I haven’t figured out how to handle the huge volume on them.  I do check out TPMCafe every week or so. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 16th, 2006 at 8:54 pm and is filed under US Politics, Weblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.