Waldo whacks Boy Fogle... again

My friend Waldo leads an almost Quixotic quest to show just how hypocritical, underhanded, and shady the world of political blogging in South Carolina is. Most are blogger-cum-consultants, being paid to spin daily what their masters feed them while offering the pretense of being "news" outlets, by posting fluff to drive traffic, as opposed to being opinion sites. Well, at least one acknowledges his site is more opinion than fact.

Any who, today Waldo offers us what can only be an exhaustive breakdown of the homophobia-for- hire which is Adam Fogle's Palmetto Scoop, a wholly owned subsidiary of former representative, now super consultant, Rick Quinn.

Full disclosure: Fogle "outed" me as anonymous blogger in 2008... because having prior been featured on The State Newspaper online as blog of the week and having linked to the blog on my facebook page says I strive for anonymity. (that's about as sarcastic as I get folks)

On The Atlantic ReDesign

So why not put my thoughts out there... everyone else has.

I'm an avid reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog The Daily Dish. Recently the entire Atlantic site underwent a drastic redesign that has riled up the readers and bloggers alike. Sullivan unloads here.

Ezra Klein, of the Washington Post, put in his two cents yesterday, and made some valid points:

The problem for the Atlantic is that they were a monthly institution entering a daily medium. Some magazines, like The American Prospect and The New Republic, solved that problem by accelerating their publication cycle to include daily Web articles and telling their staffs to blog. But some, like the Atlantic and the Washington Monthly, held back on changing the actual institution, and instead hired bloggers with existing audiences to come create daily content under the magazine's banner.

That worked out fine until the magazine wanted an online presence of its own only to realize that their acquisition strategy had left them an audience loyal to the individual "voices" rather than to the brand.

The Atlantic's redesign seems like a bet to re-center the Web site around the Atlantic as an institution rather than leaving it as a web hosting service for a couple of bloggers. What's causing the outcry is that in order to drive traffic to the new channels, they're integrating the blogs (save for the traffic-generating beast that is Sullivan's Daily Dish) into the channels. That way the readers of Ta-Nehisi's blog, to use one example, will become readers of the culture channel, which includes Ta-Nehisi's content.

If the Publisher's main concern is for the Magazine and its Web presence, then I can't help but hearken back to last year. Sullivan made an appeal to readers, that if they liked his blogging, they should support The Atlantic Monthly. I became a subscriber. My new found enthusiasm for the magazine has spread to friends of mine who are also now new subscribers to The Atlantic.

Not only this, but Sullivan has on several occasions linked internally to other pages/stories within the Atlantic. Beyond this any redesign could be minimized in an effort to drive traffic to their channels. To use a terrible metaphor, supported cross pollination seems like the better solution to laboratory hybridization.

Now if only someone could convince the fine folks over at Sandlapper to do a redesign and hire some bloggers, but finding bloggers in this state who, while they may be partisan, aren't beholden Party consultants and could drive traffic is damned impossible.

Dividing America

Geography? Been there, done that. Culture?That's what brought us the Civil War. Economics, yeah it's been done... Politics? We've heard the Red State Blue State spiel.

But how about a meta division?

Via Richard Florida we find a new way to divide America into 7 distinct regions based purely on the social networking of Facebook. From such exotic names as Socalistan to the more mundane Greater Texas Pete Werden has analyzed 210 million Public Facebook Profiles. From the habits of facebook users and mapping their connections we can learn about the folks. Per Werden:

Some of these clusters are intuitive, like the old south, but there's some surprises too, like Missouri, Louisiana and Arkansas having closer ties to Texas than Georgia. To make sense of the patterns I'm seeing, I've marked and labeled the clusters, and added some notes about the properties they have in common.

Thus you get the map, and the descriptions of these clusters. From the available information it looks like a meta description that combines not only geographic and sociologic taxonomies but some freakanomics. Take for example "Dixie":

Probably the least surprising of the groupings, the Old South is known for its strong and shared culture, and the pattern of ties I see backs that up. Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

God is almost always in the top spot on the fan pages, and for some reasonAshley shows up as a popular name here, but almost nowhere else in the country.

If it sounds familiar, it probably should -- this nearly neatly explains, and to my estimation definitely gives meat to why Nate Silver's formulae for vote predictions were so accurate. It's a fuller picture. Let's take a look at South Carolina from Fan Page Analytics:

Profile for South Carolina

Friends

o North Carolina
o Georgia
o Florida
o DC
o New York
o Texas
o Tennessee
o Virginia
o California
o Pennsylvania

Likes

o God
o Starbucks
o I need a vacati...
o Chick-fil-A
o Freeze Pops
o Dislike Button
o Michael Jackson
o Charleston, SC
o The Beach
o I believe in God

Names

o Michael
o Jennifer
o David
o Chris
o John
o Ashley
o Jessica
o James
o Amanda
o Lisa

and Columbia, SC?

Profile for Columbia, SC

Friends

o Charleston, SC
o Greenville, SC
o Charlotte, NC
o Atlanta, GA
o Florence, SC
o Augusta, GA
o Washington, DC
o Myrtle Beach, SC
o New York, NY
o Raleigh / Durha...

Likes

o God
o Starbucks
o Chick-fil-A
o Michael Jackson
o Freeze Pops
o Dislike Button
o I need a vacati...
o Taraji P. Henson
o R.I.P Michael J...
o I believe in God

Names

o Michael
o Chris
o John
o Jennifer
o David
o Ashley
o Jessica
o James
o Amanda
o Jason

Oh those Muppets

They were huge in the 80's. Big Bird's tribute to their creator at his funeral is possibly the saddest thing in modern popular culture, and now they're back with 'huge hits' (pun intended) on the interwebs.... er... webernets. All I can say is I sympathise with Beaker and keeping pace with technology.

SOTU '10

In case you missed the SOTU, and how could you - you had the ability to stream it on your iPhone? - Ben Smith has the full text.

Andrew Sullivan has a round up of the salient SOTU Reax.

I watched it on Cable, and followed the twitter reactions.

I'm baaaaacckk

After nearly a year on blog hiatus, I've decided to return to the blogosphere, at this new address. This time I won't be blogging anonymously though I've retained my original pseudonym in the blogspot address and profile. Like before I'll be a bit all over the place topic wise, but hopefully will be a little more restrained in how and what I post. The object here is a little more reflection and a lot less reaction. That's not to say that I won't pen a screedal every now and then or resort to certain low brow humor, but.. I'll try and keep it to a minimum.

So why here - why not Leonardo's Notebook? It is all about new beginnings. If I had returned to the notebook there would have been certain stylistic and contextual expectations, and there would have been certain bloggy baggage. Not to say I want to place a distance between my work here and the notebook, but I want to try a different direction - one I feel I couldn't go with the notebook.

For now then we're going to move from key to quire and start the journey a new. Happy Blogging.