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| Lighten Up, Francis! |
| Fundraising posts only happen quarterly, and are gone as soon as we meet the goal. Help make it happen. |
Posted on 07/11/2003 6:55:08 PM PDT by Political Numbers Guy
Are Freepers still winning the online war?
I think we still are. But as conservatives, we need to ask what we can be doing better. One area in which we can and do must do more is blogs. What are blogs, you ask? They’re personal web journals run by online pundits, and they’re achieving enormous popularity both online and in the media. Blogs like InstaPundit.com, the Volokh Conspiracy, and Right Wing News are daily must reads where some of the best minds opine on the really important stories of the day, and where upstart bloggers (folks not unlike you and me) can get noticed just for covering the news well. Great blogs are like mini-Free Republics, and they’re growing at mind-boggling warp speed.
Grassroots conservatives have yet to make their presence known in the blogging arena. Blogdex.net tracks the most popular stories in blogs, and the worst sorts of lies about our President and our mission of liberation in Iraq top the charts every day. Today, it’s CBS News’ big lie that “Bush knew” that the Nigerian intel was false – something directly contradicted by its own story (first exposed by blogger Eugene Volokh). Despite a healthy supply of intelligent right-leaning bloggers, conservative stories always linger toward the bottom of the list.
As a longtime lurker and occasional poster, it surprises me that Freepers largely haven’t 1) picked up on the truly brilliant material that is produced by bloggers everyday – the good ones are seriously 10 times better than anything you’ll read on any op-ed page, and 2) struck out into this new medium ourselves by starting blogs to expand Free Republic’s sphere of influence.
Free Republic is a great rallying point for conservatives – but to truly defeat the Left, we need to be bigger than just one website. Bloggers have created value by building a network of thousands of smaller sites that are catching on like wildfire, and unfortunately the Left has taken advantage of it. There’s even talk of blogs becoming the “liberal talk radio.” There’s still time to stop this. By dominating Free Republic, talk radio, and blogs, there is no way Democrats and the Left can win at the grassroots.
There is something you can do right now. Start a blog. Go to http://www.blogspot.com and set up a free site for yourself. Start reading and linking to other conservative-minded blogs and your favorite Freeper threads. You’ll notice your readership start growing right away. Post the best stuff you in the “blogosphere” on Free Republic. Just 50 or 100 successful new conservative blogs can tilt the balance in a profound way and draw even more attention to our efforts here on Free Republic.
The expansion of direct personal publishing by bloggers is something we have to pay attention to. Free Republic could benefit immensely by giving Freepers free and/or premium blog hosting – attracting traffic and links from thousands of other blogs. The liberal rag Salon did this, and this is partly why the Left started gaining traction in blogging. AOL is now rolling out their own blogging product, and this blog piece talks about how it can and will be used to promote AOL content. Hosting blog sites on Free Republic makes plenty of sense from both an activism and a marketing perspective. Case in point: instead of just one fundraising thermometer on top of every FR page, there’d be hundreds more on popular blogs hosted on FreeRepublic.com, each linked to by dozens of outside blogs.
What does everyone think of these ideas? Most importantly, how can we make this happen?
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| Lighten Up, Francis! |
| Fundraising posts only happen quarterly, and are gone as soon as we meet the goal. Help make it happen. |
something directly contradicted by its own story (first exposed by blogger Eugene Volokh)Actually, some young whipper-snapper had it up at 9:30.
Thank you Cathryn!
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