The most successful blog doesn’t have the initials TMV but, according to the Weekly Standard, is the Daily Kos because of its whopping readership and unabashedly activist role:
WHEN DISCUSSING Markos Moulitsas and the eponymous left wing blog that he runs, The Daily Kos it’s helpful to start with a few facts. The Daily Kos (rhymes with rose, based on Moulitsas’ old army nickname) is far and away the most popular blog on the Internet: Kos averages over 400,000 page views a day. By comparison, the second most popular blog, right leaning law professor Glenn Reynolds’s Instaapundit averages barely 200,000 page views a day.
"BARELY" 200,000 pages view a day? I’ll have what this guy is drinking. But we digress:
Kos also walks a different beat than his conservative counterparts. Most popular conservative bloggers (like Instapundit, Powerline and Roger Simon) use their blogs as a platform to discuss not only their political views but anything else that catches their fancy. For instance, Power Line might devote 500 words to celebrating Riche Haven’s birthday or Reynolds might devote half an afternoon to digital photography or nanotechnology. While all of these gentleman are supporters of George W. Bush, none are activists–at least not on their blogs. The prototypical conservative blogger offers political commentary, but that’s where his mission ends.
Kos outwardly and unambiguously defines his role differently. He has proudly assumed the task of getting Democrats elected and never denies that he is an activist, not an objective commentator. He has built the Daily Kos community to further that activism with painstaking care. And while Kos is certainly not the finest writer in the blogosphere, he is amongst its shrewdest operators. And by almost any measure, he is
the most successful blogger in the business.
We have to admit it: TMV reads TONS of blogs and he respects anyone who is willing to put his/her/its opinions out there. So he reads right and left blogs (but doesn’t read a blog that attacks him personally, figuring there are plenty of blogs out there that debate ideas). And on the topic of Daily Kos we say this: it is truly habit forming.
Too often people insists only only reading a weblog or site that they totally agree with. If that’s the criteria, than if you’re not a partisan Democrat you might not (or depending on your degree of GOP partisanship) definitely won’t like Kos. But if you enjoy reading a variety of ideas, Kos has ideas clearly expressed, and specific info you can compare with other info you read elsewhere. It’s specific and reliable.
But we have to say: we’ll never have his hits because we truly ENJOY occasionally writing about things such as Viagra, Johnny Carson and running photos of the land where Dennis Kucinich and Alan Keyes reside (Mars). ONE DAY the world will come around to our warped perspective and we’ll have 500,000 hits a day…
Of course, it’s just easier to listen to Air America or Rush Limbaugh and get your ideas from those sources — but if you like harvesting your own ideas so you can bake your own political mental bread into opinion derived from your own thought, then Kos (and along with conservative and moderate bloggers) is a must read.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.