Are Freepers Still Winning the Online War?

Vanity | 7/11/03 | me

[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?

[Wordsmith]

bumped and bookmarked

[windchime]

You write so well that I wanted to make sure you saw this!

[longtermmemmory]

blogs are going to be a leftist dominated and JOURNALIST dominated area because a blog is like television. Absolute control of ideas. My blog, my rules. No other ideas will be allowed but mine.

FR is about the marketplace of ideas. Blogs are about only ONE person's idea. Most leftist blog ideas would never survive on FR.

[W. W. SMITH]

bookmark

[Behind Liberal Lines]

http://www.federalreview.com/

http://hanksblog.blogspot.com/

[kms61]

Hats off to y'all who can keep up the bloggin routine. I tried it for a while, and really wasn't satisfied with the result. Most of what I wrote seemed pretty banal on second reading.

[Imal]

You write so well that I wanted to make sure you saw this!

Aw shucks! [clasps hands behind back, looks down sheepishly and kicks a few pebbles]

Be careful, you just might start something. I don't have the inclination to do a daily blog, and am mainly a hit-and-run FReeper, but who knows, maybe a "wheneverly" blog may still have some merit.

I'll look into it, God help us all. :^)

[Dont Mention the War]

I too love instapundit, but mainly for the sheer volume of quality info. that's posted to it. Glenn Reynolds is a very bright guy but he has a serious blind spot when it comes to moral topics.

And a growing ego problem.

[Cordova Belle]

What? JohnHuang2 doesn't have his own blog?
Impossible.

[Cordova Belle]

What? MHGinTN doesn't have his own blog?
Impossible.

[MHGinTN]

I use my profile page here at FR to post essays. I don't maintain a blog page ... had one on Geocities, but when they started asking for me to pay to 'upgrade' because I was getting a lot of hits, I discontinued the effort. I've got a collection of essays, a story or two, and pieces of a novel I was working on at the time floating somewhere in cyber spacedom, lost in the Geocities integration with a larger holding. I mysteriously got 'integrated' to oblivion just in the middle of a series of Christian Apologetics I was writing and storing there.

I guess I should ask, 'How difficult is it to set up a blog at blogspot.com and will they begin demanding a fee when hits start to accumulate?'

[gcruse]

E-mail sent to columnist thingie.

[Dont Mention the War]

I guess I should ask, 'How difficult is it to set up a blog at blogspot.com and will they begin demanding a fee when hits start to accumulate?'

Not difficult at all. Go there, pick a name, pick a design, and start typing.

They won't demand a fee at all, since they put an ad at the top of your blog. Your bandwidth allotment would be 250MB/mo, which will be quite enough for you unless you get very popular. If you started hitting that limit, you would have to upgrade to "Blogspot Plus," which is $5/mo (and has other benefits you may or may not want; see here for details).

[Imal]

Well, here it is: The World According to Imal

I blame you! :^)

Mainly a bunch of backfill boilerplate for now, but we'll see where it goes.

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the list.

[windchime]

"I blame you! :^)"


After going to your 'spot', I'll accept that as credit rather than blame. Thank you!

I understand your reluctance to burden yourself with being expected to post daily. It seems events and your reaction to them would dictate the frequency of your posts (just as they do here at Free Republic). It would also make it easier for occasional readers to keep up.

I love your definitions of 'Bushisms' and agree that our President is underestimated. Your 'screaming at God' is enjoyable reading of 'canned brain food' with a peppering of humor. I'll return for more.

[Cacique]

1) I think we have become complacent. November 2000 was like the liberation of Iraq. We won our victory against insurmountable odds.

2) Like in Iraq the RATS and the left have begun to bushwhack us and are engaged in low intensity warfare via their control of the media. Trying to wear us down.

3) The web is still our domain. But as in all wars the left is learning to use it as well. We need more pundits and a better fund-raising and organizing apparatus. We also need more FReepers willing to FReep. Being a FReeper isn't just about coming to this site and posting or lurking. We need to man the barricades and take the streets.

[Imal]

I love your definitions of 'Bushisms' and agree that our President is underestimated. Your 'screaming at God' is enjoyable reading of 'canned brain food' with a peppering of humor. I'll return for more.

Hehe thanks. Flattery will get you everywhere. :^)

Hopefully my readers won't have to eat out of a can for long. I am currently reading Ann Coulter's eye-opening book Treason, and you can expect some commentary to emerge on the old blogsite.

As it is, I find myself saying "Oh my God!" a lot more than I expected to as I read it. If it weren't for her extensive citation of verifiable sources, I would swear the book was fiction. Be afraid, be very afraid.

While the blogsite doesn't allow for feedback per se (a deficiency in my view), I always welcome it here, where I the benefit of collective genius to aid me when I stray afield in my musings.

Thanks for the inspiration, and be well!

[George W. Bush]

Answer: no.

[Recovering_Democrat]

sounds great, but when I try to create a blog, I get caught in a loop, where it won't create. is blogspot.com down ?