GOP Lags on the Internet Frontier (Free Republic slagged again)

The Politico ^ | Monday, August 13, 2007 | Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry

[kristinn]

Let's see, FR and Drudge swamp Kos in traffic, have so for years, yet we're the problem. Okay.....

[muawiyah]

Free Republic and Drudge are, after all, not part of the Republican party ~ but DailyKos is definitely the mouthpiece for the Nazis. Democrats affiliate with that steaming P-S at their own risk.

[Choose Ye This Day]

They look at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, which brought together some 1,500 Netroots Democrats the first weekend in August, and wonder, "Where's our YearlyKos?"

We do?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

But Patrick Ruffini, the former e-campaign director for the Republican National Committee (and briefly an adviser to the Rudy Giuliani campaign)...

Uh-huh - stopped right there.

[dirtboy]

Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a 'vanity' and it was frowned upon.

Links to blogs are NOT verboten. However, to keep FR from getting overwhelmed by blob pimps, blog links are not mixed in with news.

The discouragement of vanity posts also serves to keep FRs signal to noise ratio well above that of other sites.

[Izzy Dunne]

Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions and to raise money for conservative candidates.

Put up an online poll, stand back, and THEN say that, punk.

[TommyDale]

Well you can thank all the Rudy Giuliani people for driving dozens of otherwise good conservatives away from FR to other sites.

[dirtboy]

But Patrick Ruffini, the former e-campaign director for the Republican National Committee (and briefly an adviser to the Rudy Giuliani campaign)...

Too funny. Ruffini is still trying to get the license plate of the truck that ran over him, and then went around the block and creamed him again. Both Rudy and the RNC got taken to the woodshed by the grassroots over their liberalism and support of shamnesty.

[rocksblues]

I never knew that FR was a Republican site. I knew that Kos was a Democrat site though.

[Glenn]

The GOP was at some point offering a 30% bounty to sites who drummed up donations for the party. I don’t know if that is still so. If it isn’t, I guess it didn’t work out so well.

[ichabod1]

Yeah, all FR is is the most up-to-date and comprehensive news digest the world has ever seen. This site makes Drudge redundant. The author fails to ‘get’ that keeping opinion under control is what makes this site. Not that there aren’t ample opportunities for opinions to be shared. In fact, I’d say that people look at this site and miss the news dissemination in favor of the opinion. But this is how news is going to work when the titans crumble.

[3AngelaD]

Yes, exactly, and what does “cooperative networking practices and freewheeling activism” mean, exactly? Do I hear chickens running around with their heads cut off?

[CharlesWayneCT]

Most of these statistics just show that democrats have a much larger base of basement loser-types who spend all their time surfing the web, making changes to their facebook entries, and pretending that the internet is a rational replacement for a real life.

Meanwhile, republicans mostly have jobs and see the internet as a tool, not as a “community” where they live.

So I use FR to get news stories and commentary on those stories, a typical liberal uses the internet to get “me-to” esteem points from other clueless liberals.

[ichabod1]

They also don’t ‘get’ that FR is the arch-enemy of the RINO republicans.

[HonestConservative]

My response to Mr Ruffini can be found here:

http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/9219ea7e-9210-4789-81aa-467505597a5b?comments=true#comments

Go to the very last commnent by Collins (that’s me)

What a yutz!

[puppypusher]

Who needs to go to a candidates political web site? All I have to do is goto FreeRepublic to get the info I need.

[ClaireSolt]

We have several notches in our belt. When we get busy we can move mountains, and we have. I believe that the first GOE outnumbered their antiwar protest by about five times, for instance.

[HonestConservative]

Exactly, which is why rino’s and folks who are rino’s and panderers don’t like us.

[philsfan24]

drudge swamps kos, freerepublic is slightly behind. alexa.com isnt the most reliable but it gives a general idea of internet traffic rankings.

[Mr. Jeeves]

If the Republican Party is thinking this way, they are in big trouble. They are refusing to understand that they are not behind in donations because they fail to understand the Internet, they are behind in donations because their elected representatives fail to listen to a single word their constituents are saying on immigration or any other major issue of the day.

Who would send hard-earned money to a Lindsey Graham?