There is a post up at ScrutinyHooligans.blogspot you will appreciate. It's called "Birds of a Feather".

Do you see a pattern here?:


- Ted Haggard and George Bush, Best Buddies -

Here's our President, George Bush, with a Meth-smoking Hypocrite!


- Jack Abramoff and George Bush, Best Buddies -

Here's our President with a scandal plagued, convicted felon!


- Tom Delay and George Bush, Best Buddies -

Here's our President with a disgraced Congressional influence peddler!

There are several more that really drive the point home. You can view the entire collection here: http://scrutinyhooligans.blogspot.com/2006...

ON EDIT: Uploaded images to photobucket so they would work here. Sorry about that.

Breaking news via BlueNC:

North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Jerry Meek today sent out an alarming email:



More details via BlueNC:

http://www.bluenc.com/they-will-stop-at-no...

Please spread the word!

Below is a 1997 court document where the plaintiff alleges, among other things, that Charles Taylor (R) of NC District 11 watched one of the managers of his bank have sex with her.

Not knowing what to make of this, I confirmed that the amended complaint was real and even interviewed the plaintiff, Janet S. Guthrie.

What's interesting to me isn't the allegations of sexual misconduct. After all, this amended complaint was denied and the original complaint was dismissed. Anybody can sue anyone for anything - so a court document in-and-of-itself proves nothing.

No, what is interesting is the absence of media attention on this case when it was going through the courts nine years ago.

So, for the public record, I'm simply going to post the court documents here today and you can come to your own conclusions.

Original post with more details here.

There are many issues facing Americans: The health-care crisis, the national debt, the destruction of the environment, crony capitalism and the erosion of our rights.

Instead of addressing these pressing issues in this mid-term election, the Republican party again brings out tripe like this to scare Americans into voting against their own best interests:

http://www.brainshrub.com/node/546

I just pulled the above video from GOP website. I couldn't make this up if I tried.

To understand how ridiculous this ad is, think about it this way: Over the next two years, you are far more likely to lose your home because you had to choose between bankruptcy or an operation, than losing it over a terrorist attack.

To make this even more bizarre - According to a leaked intelligence report, Republican policies have made American less safe from terrorism. Therefore, running a commercial like this is as if former Enron executives ran ads warning people that if they are not let off the hook, the company will go bankrupt.

I'm not saying that terrorism shouldn't be a concern, but Osama isn't "what's at stake" in 2006.

Note that this ad does not explain HOW you will be safer if you vote Republican. It simply implies that if you don't: YOU'RE GONNA DIE!!!

In our national anthem there is a verse where we sing "home of the free, land of the brave." Yet, GOP voters are motivated from fear rather than the traditional American value of courage.

ON EDIT: (I'll upload to YouTube when I can - but for now the video is on my server.)

Note to DUers, there IS a way to place tags in DU Journals. I've been experimenting, and I want to run it by Elad first. In the meantime, please read this so that you'll understand why the tags are important in the first place.



Today we are going to discuss "blog-taxonomy" and its importance. If you understand the concept, it will increase your site's traffic and repeat visitors significantly.

"Taxonomy" is the study of classifying living things. "Blog-taxonomy" is the study of how to organize your blog for the only two types of readers there are on the internet: Humans and Search Engines.*

For the sake of this discussion, let's break down a blogs taxonomy hierarchically into three parts.

1. Blog Topic: The primary topic, or niche, of your blog.
--Example: Brainshrub.com is a progressive political blog that features counterpoints with most commentary and analysis.

2. Category: The overall subject of a particular blog post.
--Example: This post titled "Respect Your Food" is filed under "Animal Rights" AND "Guest Bloggers". (Look at the top part of the post, right under the title, to see the categories.)

3. Tags: Specific subjects mentioned within a post.
--Example: that post mentioned above has the following tags: chicken - food - cooking - fast food - vegetarian - respect - farming - life - chicken fries - Burger King (Look at the bottom of the post to see the listed tags.)

Just because you don't have your blog organized neatly does not mean that search engines won't refer traffic to you. These days, the most important factor in determining your blogs relevance is by counting the number of people who link to your blog. These are known as an "inbound links".

So, for example, if a user is looking for information about "BBQ" and 10 bloggers have linked to the site "BBQ-for-dinner.com", as opposed to one link for "BBQ-barn.org" - it's likely that the first site will get more traffic referred to it by Google.

If inbound links are the primary determiner of search engine ranking, why bother with blog-taxonomy in the first place?

Because categories and tags help search engines put your work into context, and, make your site easier to navigate. If inbound links could be imagined as gold, then tags and categories can be thought of as silver and pearls.

To use this blog as an example, let's say you are intrigued with this post and you want to peruse the rest of the "Tips For Political Bloggers" series. Instead of slogging through an archive, all you need to do is go to Brainshrub.com, and click the category at the top of this post - and bam - the entire series is now available.



Or, suppose that you would like to see all the posts on Brainshrub.com that are categorized under "Democrats". Go ahead and look in the upper-right hand corner of this page, and you'll see a "site map"... notice how this blog is broken down on the site map category-by-category.

Some categories have nothing in them. That's okay, I'm giving search engines context as to what this blog is about. Besides, inevitably those categories will get filled with something.

Search engines love site maps the way credit-card companies love college students with wealthy parents; they spend a lot more time with them.

But site maps are not the only things categories can do.

Suppose you want to see what this blog spends most of it's time talking about. Note that just under the top banner of Brainshrub.com there is a tab called "tags". If you follow that link, you will be brought to the "Tag Cloud". The more bold-faced and larger the font is, the more often that category is mentioned.

Now would be a good time to say that tags fulfill many of the same functions categories do. (In fact, it's more common to see a tag-cloud broken down by tag, rather than category as is done on this site.) It's just that categories are more general, were tags are specific. For example, a blog post categorized under "Drugs" might have "Aspirin, Alcohol and Ritalin" as tags.

You'll note at the bottom of most of the blog posts on Brainshrub.com are a series of Technorati tags. They are represented as hyperlinks to the Technorati search engine. You don't need to use Technorati for your tags, but I chose to do so because it's currently the most popular tag-based search engine.**

By using Technorati tags, you can encourage people who use that search engine to visit you. As an added bonus, if you register your blog with them they will generate a cool stats page for you. Like this.

Many CMS*** have tag makers, other don't. This blog, which runs off Drupal, does not. I make my tags with this tag-maker: Life In Bush's America tag Maker.

Just type in the keywords, then generate the HTML you need for the tags.

I've done my best to explain blog-taxonomy... it took me a long time to grok why it's so important and how to implement it into my blog posts. If you don't understand anything I've written, simply post a question and I'll do my best to elaborate for you.

Note: This was originally posted here.

* This could also be called "SEO", or, Search Engine Optimization. However, I'm only going to focus on why it's important to organize your blog well, and not other things you can do to make your site friendly to the search engines.

** There are other's like IceRocket, and certain CMS*** have their own tag systems.

*** CMS: Content Management System. A web-based application that allows you to create and post to a blog. Examples are Blogger, WordPress or Mambo. Brainshrub.com runs off the Drupal CMS.

Today we are going to talk about Bandwidth Theft and how to make it work for you.

Bandwidth Theft (aka "Inline linking" or "leeching") is when a someone posts media on the web that uses the bandwidth and hosting services of an unwilling party.

For example, if you right-clicked on the picture at the top of this post and looked at its properties, you would notice the following URL address: http/ /www.brainshrub. com/media/pictures/tips-political-bloggers.jpg

The owner of the domain (In this case, me.) is the one who foots the bill for hosting this particular image. By simply copy-and-pasting the URL into an IMG tag, you could post this blue banner onto your blog, and I'd be stuck paying for the privilege.

To illustrate how easy this is to do: Right-click the wine-glass and look at its properties. Notice that the source of the image is coming from athomeasheville.com. I am, in effect, "stealing" that blog's bandwidth.*

The reason most webmasters and bloggers don't appreciate media-leeching is because it potentially slows down the original site, and bandwidth costs money.

There are a number of different strategies to deal with bandwidth theft. If the webmistress of athomeasheville.com objected that I was using the picture, she could tell her server to block all requests for media that are not coming from her own site. Or, she could simply change the name of the image and then the wine-glass would show up as a broken link here at DemocraticUnderground.

Still another strategy is to host your images on a free 3rd party service such Flickr or Photobucket. In that case, you may not need to worry about the cost of bandwidth at all.

However, I have learned that you can harness the power of rude web-surfers to increase your site traffic and blog-brand: The secret is to create a watermark for pictures you host on your site.

If you look through Brainshrub.com, you will notice that most pictures have a watermark and a dark blue border.

By doing this, anytime someone takes a picture from this site to post on their own blog or forum, whether they use my bandwidth or not, I am getting low-cost advertising.

Don't get me wrong: I would MUCH prefer that people would not engage in bandwidth theft. But since I can't stop people from taking my images and posting them around the net, I might as well profit from the practice.

Watermarks are easy to generate and customize in Photoshop. Simply create a text layer with your site's name, then tweak the blending options by right-clicking on the "layers palette" with the text:



Warning: Never put a watermark on an image that you do not own the copyright to or is not part of the creative commons. If you absolutely must do this, place it next to your own comments and not on the picture itself. You shouldn't be posting copyrighted media on your blog to start with, however this is a legal gray area on the blogosphere that we'll talk about in another post.

Another benefit of bandwidth theft is that it gives you an opportunity to punish people who take your images out of context.

For example, a year ago a poster from the conservative website FreeRepublic.com took an image from my photo album to "prove" that Andy Stephenson was exaggerating his illness. (Most DUers know what happened, but if you don't here are more details on the Stephenson story.)

At first I was upset, but then I got creative and added some text to the image:

Dear Freepers, Andy's disease came on suddenly. This picture, taken 01/20/2005, cannot be used as a tool for diagnosing illness anymore than a heavily edited video can diagnose brain death. Peace be to you all. Brainshrub.

Since the editing period had passed on that forum, there was nothing the bandwidth-thief could do short of asking the FreeRepublic moderators to remove the whole post.

In conclusion, bandwidth theft is annoying - but by adding a watermark you can promote your site and increase your site traffic.

* I got permission from www.athomeasheville.com to do this, so I guess it isn't really stealing - but you get the idea.

This article was cross-posted from here.

I just posted a transcript of a conversation I had with a local National Guard recruiter. It got me to thinking: If I had recorded the conversation, would it have been legal to post the audio on my blog?

Somehow, I doubt it. Heck, I'm not even sure it would have been legal for me to record the man in the first place!

I'm asking this rhetorical question because there are a lot of bloggers on DU. It's only a matter of time before some DU Journal or Liberal blogger posts a link to a recorded a conversation.

Let's say, for the sake of this discussion, that I did record the recruiter for this post: www.brainshrub.com/national-guard-free-tra...

Does anyone have any insight, links or experience in this matter?

P.S. (I should be absolutely clear: I PLAN TO ASK A REAL LAWYER ABOUT THIS MATTER. As much as I like y'all, I'm not about to take legal advise from an online forum... and neither should you.)

Occasionally you come across a study that backs up with science what you've learned through trail-and-error.

Over the past year I developed something I came to call "The Magic F". The word "magic" may sound silly, but it was the only way I could explain the observation that content organized in an F-shaped pattern seemed to encourage people to spend more time on Brainshrub.com, and, they were more likely to return later.

Last month, I finally found someone who had studied and described this phenomena in detail: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content.

Go read it now, then come back here and we'll discuss a few extra thoughts on the matter.

Well? What are you waiting for? Shoo! I'll be here when you get back.

...

All done?

Good.

Web surfers rarely read entire blog posts. Instead, they scan them for relevant information then move onto another site. Therefore, your goal as a blogger should be focused on making scanning rewarding so that readers are encouraged to return day after day for more information.

My experience with my own site has been that this pattern works best for reader retention and return visits:



The red areas are where you should place the main points of your blog entry. The blue areas are ideal spots for pictures, graphs or bullet points that reward the human eye for scanning the page.

One of the most common mistakes writers make with their blogs is that they forget that the internet is not printed with ink. Unlike paper, computer screens are a strain on the eyes. Very few people have the patience to read 1,500 words of text on a monitor, no matter how well-written or astute the essay is.

If you want a blog that will help create social change, you have to be able to get your message across first. To do this on the blogoshere, work within the limitations of the medium: Reward the reader with images, keep your posts to under 500 words and make darn sure that your main points are written within the red zones of the "Magic F".

In blogging, how you lay out your text is more important than the quality of your writing.

Make the Magic F your friend, and you will be richly rewarded.

Cross posted here.

From: www.brainshrub.com/candidates-respect-blog...



On a national scale, it's easy to see the effect that blogging has. Look at Kos or DU as case-examples.

But on the local level, how can bloggers measure their effectiveness? Do bloggers have a place at the table when it comes to local elections?

Is blogging nothing more than a lazy way to do activism?

This is for those of you following the DU Journal - Brainshrub: Best. Journal. Ever! (Tips for political bloggers.)

Back in high school I used to work as a waiter. I remember overhearing two business people having a conversation over lunch. An older gentleman was giving advice to a younger man who was planning to buy a company that wasn't doing very well. They were discussing who should be laid off and who should stay after the acquisition was complete.

I wasn't privy to the whole conversation, but I do remember one comment that the older man told his friend:

"Take each person aside and ask h/er to describe exactly what they do. If the employee can't sell you in two sentences or less, they are superfluous and should be fired."

As I've gotten into blogging I have to admit that the old man's statement, while shocking to me at the time, is especially good advice to writers working to build traffic to their blogs.

From an SEO perspective the most successful blogs are not the best written, or the most frequently updated. (Although that certainly helps.) The blogs that do best in the long term are the ones that know their subject matter and stick to it. These bloggers can tell you, in one or two sentences, what their blog is about - and how it's different from most other sites on similar topics.

Knowing what your blogs subject matter is going to be is deeper than just coming up with a catchy slogan; it involves deciding what you are going to give to your visitors in exchange for their time.

Once you've decided what your topic is going to be, and how you plan to deliver it, stick to an 80/20 rule. For example: If you decide to specialize in Black Box voting issues, 80% of the posts should be about Black Box voting - or at least somewhat related. It's okay to occasionally post a picture of the tomatoes in your garden, or comment on a sporting event - but the moment your tangents take up more than 20% of content, it's time to change your blogs subject matter to be broader in scope.

People visit sites that cater to specific tastes. It's unpleasant to visit a blog about cars only to find every other post to be about kittens.

To use an example outside of blogging: Most people would be disinclined to return to a dining establishment that advertises itself as a Chinese restaurant, when 20% of the food is Italian. While it is true that a chef can break new ground with a "Chinese-Italian" fusion - it's a tremendous risk that rarely works out. (Which is why you don't see many restaurants engage in this strategy.)

Peace,

Paul -V-

This is for those of you following the DU Journal - Brainshrub: Best. Journal. Ever! (Tips for political bloggers.)

Today we are going to discuss what to do when you catch a politician, pundit or public figure lie or say something unbelievably stupid online. The first step is to save the page to your computer by clicking "file" --> "save page" on the browser.

However, what you really need to do is get a good screenshot so that people can see what the page looked like before you exposed them. Google's cashe can be cleaned a lot faster than you think if the webmaster knows what she's doing.

As a case study, we are going to use the recent Kaloogian photo because I noticed that my site was the only one that managed to get a good screen capture before they changed it. (Thus illustrating how important it is to do this quickly and correctly.)

I will be using the Firefox browser because it offers a number of features that help with getting good screen captures. If you still use Microsoft's IE - tough. Switch to a real browser already!



The basic way to get a quick screenshot is by hitting Ctrl + Print Screen, then open your favorite image editing software and hit Ctrl + V.

Before doing so take the following steps:

A: Keep the screenshot under 500 pixels across in order to encourage people to post it their blogs and forums. An actual-size screenshot takes a long time to load and may ruin the layout of the page. What I do is hit the "Restore Down" button in the upper-right and play with the edges so that the window approximately the size it needs to be. Then I move the window to the bottom-right for the time-stamp. (See step G.)

B: Make darn sure that your watermark is on the page! If the story catches on, you want people to know it was your blog that caught it.

C: Make sure the entire URL can be seen.

D: The tab feature in Firefox gives you an extra opportunity to promote your site. Use it.

E: Resize the text so that people can make it out clearly BEFORE you take the screenshot. Resized text in PhotoShop looks blurry so it's better to have the text at the right size first.

F: In order to have a time-stamp for the image, hold your mouse over the clock in the taskbar so that the date shows up.

G: Showing the taskbar gives an extra assurance that this is a real screenshot, and not a PhotoShopped job. (All this can be faked, and that's why I subliminally acknowledge this fact by displaying the PhotoShop icon with the screenshot. It forces people to ask themselves "Is this real?" before they are told what to think by their favorite pundit.)

H: A quick description.

There is an extension in Firefox that you will also find useful. It's called: ScreenGrab, and you can download it here: http://andy.5263.org/screengrab

ScreenGrab allows you to take a picture of the entire page without the scroll bar. Simply right click like this:



Then you will have something that looks like this: (I resized this so it would fit as a thumbnail, but you should get the idea that the ENTIRE front-page of Brainshrub.com was captured.)



While this is too small to make out, it would make a great button for a hyperlink for the full-sized version.

Here is another example of a screenshot I've taken:



I predicted that Willis would remove this when I exposed him, so I prepared the screenshot - but didn't post it. Sure enough, when the page was taken down, I was able to embarrass him again with the actual evidence.

God I love being a blogger!

So what do you think DU? Any advice you'd like to share if you catch a conservative lying on the internets?

This is for those of you following the DU Journal: Brainshrub - Best. Journal. Ever! (Tips for political bloggers.)

Performancing.com has a wonderful piece on 10 Ways To Lose RSS Subscribers (Note: the link is www.performancing.com/node/1934 I don't know why the link is going to "pernacing". The code in the message is correct, I've checked it a dozen times.)

Visit the site for the full details, but to sum up:

1. Hardly post and when you do it is to apologize for not posting
   
2. Re-post boingboing or some other popular blog, or copy and paste press releases
   
3. Only ever write when in a bad mood, drunk or have nothing to say
   
4. Constant unrelenting negativity
   
5. Bang on about the same old gripe day after day
   
6. Talk down to your audience like they are idiots
   
7. Be incomprehensible
   
8. Be elitist
   
9. Be needy (Sucking up to A listers)
   
10. Constant irrelevance
    

Forget your RSS feeds - this is a great way to lose readers period.

I particularly agree 100% with #1.

For Gods sake, don't apologize for not updating your blog! Just update it.

The fact that you haven't updated your blog or journal for 3 months adds nothing to the conversation. If anything, it makes readers less inclined to visit again because you've just reminded them that you don't update every day.

Think of it this way:

When an actor forgets his lines during a play and has to ad-lib a bit - she doesn't come on stage during the intermission to apologize. All that would do is bring attention to the gaff.

Banging on the same gripe every day is also tiresome. Even BradBlog, whose primary issue is BBV, takes time to discuss other topics. If people are visiting your blog, they already know that Bush sucks - so try to find other things to write about.

Peace,

Paul -V-

P.S. (By the way, I'd like to apologize for not updating my DU Journal every day.)

This is for those of you following my DU Journal: Brainshrub - Best. Journal. Ever! (Tips for political bloggers.)

I want to encourage all serious bloggers to consider volunteering as a moderator for DU.

There are three events that were pivotal to how I write for my own blog:

1) I used to be a moderator for DU.
2) Three weeks in a ditch in Texas.
3) A conversation I had with EarlG in September of 2005

I will talk about #2 and #3 some other time, but for now I want to discuss what it is like to moderate for DU - and why the experience is valuable for up-and-coming bloggers.

Being a DU Mod will give you a birds-eye view to the progressive movement in a way that simply can't be explained.

You will learn what causes flame-wars, and how to handle them without getting drawn in.
You will learn how to deal with trolls. (And see how useless trolling is.)
You will make friends with other bloggers, and they will give you sage advice.
You will learn what kind of writing piques peoples interest, and what is counter-productive.

But most importantly, you will learn that what you write is *gasp* read by people! I know that sounds obvious, but so often bloggers (And DUers) forget that the person you are talking to has feelings. Until you have to deal with hurt and offended people one-on-one, you don't understand what effect your writing has on other people.

You will also learn that, at the end of the day, DU is not the be-all-end-all of the Liberal blogosphere. No matter how intense a conversation is to you, within 48 hours, most people will have forgotten about it.

Yet, conversely, you will also learn that while threads may die - your online reputation is has a tremendous influence on how people respond to your writing.

If anything, being a DU mod will make you a more considerate, and honest, writer because you will get a glimpse of the long-term effect that your writing has on others.

It is my opinion that all bloggers should spend a few months modding their favorite forums. You will only gain from the experience.

Peace,

Paul -V-
www.brainshrub.com

ON EDIT: Past or present mods, please feel free to weigh in here about what you have learned.

This is for those of you following the DU Journal: Brainshrub - Best. Journal. Ever! (Tips for political bloggers.)

Okay class... settle down. Open your virtual books to chapter 8.

Today we are going to talk about a website that every serious Liberal political blogger should know about. No, not the DemocraticUnderground. We are going to learn about ProBlogger.net.

ProBlogger is not political, it is for professional bloggers who want to keep current with trends. Don't worry if you don't consider yourself a "professional", there is plenty for you to read about.

Blogging is an art. To get good at an art you have to practice every day and keep current with the lasted news in the industry. In my opinion, ProBlogger does this best. (I have never visited that site without learning something new about blogging.)

Your homework assignment: Visit www.problogger.net then come back to this thread and tell the class one thing you've learned about blogging.

Class dismissed.

This is for those following the DU Journal: Brainshrub - Best. Journal. Ever! (Tips for political bloggers.)

Although this journal is less than a week old, I've gotten several IMs requesting step-by-step instructions on how to use some of the basic features of the DU Journals. Therefore, I've decided to expand this this journal's subject matter a bit to include tutorials for people new to this blogging phenomenon.

I will still be covering SEO and writing tips for political bloggers, but it's important that people who are new to this system get over their fear of the new technology as soon as possible.

Be will start simply, then move up through all the wonderful ways to customize your DU Journal.

Please don't be scared to ask questions. There is a profound difference between stupidity and ignorance. No one will laugh at you.

Okay, I might snicker a little bit ... but you can't see me, and neither can anyone else.

The first tutorial will be something very easy: Adding a DUers Journal and/or blog to your blogroll. A "blogroll" is just a fancy name for a list of links.

If you follow these instructions, you'll be able to keep track of the rest of this series easily because you'll have a handy-dandy link to my DU Journal.

Ready?

Okay.

Step one: Get a beer from the fridge. I am partial to Guinness myself.

Step two:


Step three:


Step four:


Step five:


Step six:


Step Seven:
Pat yourself of the back, and finish your beer.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is just the first tutorial. If there is a tutorial you'd like to see done, please go ahead and suggest it!