I've been meaning to do this for a while. Let me confess: I am sick and tired of people sending me shit they want posted here; and of course, and this is inevitable, now, this very instant. Like the other night when my friend Tracey Denton sends out a request to have her event with Christine Quinn, gag, for the next day. Here's a really dumb idea: don't treat bloggers like your own personal press staff. Don't assume that we just sit around waiting for your pearls of wisdom or import.

Here's another idea: how about you sign up for an account and post your own stuff? What, I need to lend my name, implying endorsement, to Quinn? Do you know what I deduce from these things? That the people making these requests just don't have much respect for us here at all. We're not trained monkeys; maybe worthwhile to point that out occasionally.

Or, say, my friend Rock, who has been sending me his stuff in Word format for years. What you see on this site under Rock's handle? T'was all me. And it's simply not the case that I don't like being helpful. But after years of this, I now need to reinstall my entire Office Suite, because the last document he sent me was infected with something. Coincidentally, our friends at Room Eight provide the same service to Mr. Hackshaw.

In addition, since, again, I try to be helpful, I've laid out to Rock several times, in detail, how this site works. I'm the first to grant that this site has an asinine architecture. But five-year-olds can do this. This is basic literacy in 2009, one would think. It's like having someone read you the newspaper because you can't read, or, in Rock's case, simply can't be bothered to figure shit out.

So here we go. I know that Rock isn't the only one who has had problems with this bizarre site, true enough. So this isn't just for him.

If you don't have an account, create one. That seems to work fine for most people, even if this site produces the craziest errors I've ever seen. Ignore them; TDG just does that to annoy the fuck out of everyone.

Once you have the account, log in. Provide your password to do so.

Look at the top right-hand corner of the page. Ignore everything except the "Post a blog entry" link. Click on that.

Great. Now you're in the screen I'm looking at right now. Ignore everything - especially the forest of categories; more on that in a bit - except this: the title field, and the larger field called Body. That's your blog post. Give it a title, and write or cut'n'paste your diary in the container marked body. That's it.You should also go to the top "categories" field and give some tags to describe your content. This allows Google, for example, to help find your content. Just don't go nuts with the eight data fields. You only need one. Some accounts have a little HTML toolbar that lets you do some nifty things like bold stuff; nice, but not essential.

When you're done, hit preview. If everything's okay, great: hit submit.

And that's it. The site will occasionally have the hiccups, but this is how it works. Like I said, five-year-olds can do this. Candidates for City Council shouldn't be any less resourceful.  read more »

I don’t know why my friend Michael Bouldin from the Daily Gotham website/blog, chose to lock down his comment section, after an out of the ordinary column entitled The tormented egos of blogdom, on 8th June, 2008. Too many lattes in the in the dog days of June, I guess. Or could it be that sitting in the sun too long -in some overly pretentious Park Slope sidewalk café- shifts your thinking cap somewhat? Well, for whatever the reason, the bourgeois Bouldin isn’t exactly known for shying away from lively threads, so it was -to say the least- a bit surprising, to see him immediately close up shop; and after hanging me out there to dry like that. But I have been thinking about that column ever since, because it raised for me the spectre of MB agonizing over the central question here: why the fuck do I blog?

Bouldin paid me a compliment of sorts when he was refreshingly honest about his knowledge (or lack) of black politics, as it plays out in the hood. He even went further when he said that he knows much more than the average white boy cares to know about the politics of the black communities; and that he got that knowledge frown Chris Owens and myself. Herein lies one of the big political problems of this naked city: the average white person doesn’t give a damn about the problems of the average black person in this naked city. It starts with the mayor and goes all the way down the totem pole.

Look, let’s hold that for another column (maybe); let’s just try to answer the central question here. It would be easy for anyone of you to say: it’s your ego stupid; but I won’t let you off the hook that easily or so cheaply. And the reason I won’t is because it is much more complicated that that. At least for me.  read more »

Okay, I know I've been picking on self-appointed machine loyalty enforcer Gatemouth rather often recently, but his newest offenses do deserve some comment.

The more obvious observation about the flood the man whom Pete Sikora describes as toxic released this weekend is this: if one posts material under a given alias, such as Gatemouth, and then decides to post more or less the same material under a different alias, presumably to have some safe harbor from a powerful United States Senator dissed therein, it's known as sockpuppetry. This is generally frowned upon as dishonest. Further, if one nonetheless essays to do this, it's wise to not use the exact same formatting that characterizes one's usual cut-and-pasted-from-Word-Perfect effluvia, because that's kind of a dead giveaway. One could go further and note that it's also considered bad form, when one obviously would like to remain anonymous, as evidenced by posting under an unacknowledged handle, to publish other people's private emails, email addresses, and phone numbers. That's just not done, in part because it invites spam, but in larger part because it's thuggish.

Going further, there's also a (signed and attributed) piece, which really takes several cakes. The length of this effort provides an effective safeguard against its being read. That said, somewhere in the bog is this:  read more »

So I just cruised on over to Room Eight, which I very rarely do, and found this bit of piffle. My apologies if this isn't, shall we say, timely. The subject is the state blog credential to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, which for this state, to everyone's astonishment, went to that blog.

Under the heading of Room Eight Envy, we find this:

The DNC [Ed. note: Actually, it was the DNCC, which is a different animal] earlier this month unveiled its 55 picks. Predictably, complaints from the feisty independent blogosphere started to emerge, the most high profile of which came from the progressive blogfathers themselves, DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas and OpenLeft co-founder Matt Stoller.

The piece is a teaser for this article in Wired (to which I contributed a number of emails, so I'm somewhat surprised it came out as it did), which deals with the controversy over state blog credentials at the DNCC.

So I just have to point out that envy isn't really what's being felt on the subject. Surprise, consternation, amusement, sure. Envy? No, not really, or not at all.

I'd further suggest that, honestly, this type of rhetoric isn't going to further the kind of era of good feelings some of us have been trying to foster over the entire mess. Something that looks like a sharp stick in the eye or even, heavens forfend, gloating, isn't all that helpful. Because, you know, that would tend to piss people off royally.

It's a funny thing, this blogging business. You post stuff, and miraculously enough, people read it.

There are several ways to approach this enterprise. One can blog because one has something to say about a subject under-served elsewhere; that's why Rock Hackshaw writes, I suppose. There aren't many ways to know as much about black politics in Brooklyn as whichever paths have led him to his mastery of the subject. What I know about black politics, and I know more than the average white boy is interested in knowing, I learned from Rock and Chris Owens.

Then, there are those who write because they enjoy the medium itself, the texture and feeling of posting what would otherwise be one's private thoughts to the world at large. That's in large measure what Liza does. She's one of the pioneers of the medium, after all. I'll add another observation: if you want to know what shape this medium is going to take in the near future, you can do worse than cribbing from the Blatinosphere, because they're leading the way in technology, always have. It's not all about opinionated white boys on the bleeding edge, quite the contrary.

Then, there are the activists, people such as myself. I do this because I think it's important to have a place where you can come to read about Progressive politics in a way that relates to where you are where and how you live. This because, frankly, for such a blue state, New York is astonishingly lame in terms of leading the way on Progressive values and initiatives in our government. There are many reasons for this, chief among the complacency that sets in when you win elections in some parts of the state, without much effort, by astonishing margins. This complacency, I'd argue, the laziness that comes from winning without deserving a win or having articulated why you should win, is why the heavily Democratic parts of this state have such abysmal voter turnout ratios, and why there is a grinding sense of powerlessness in so many communities. It's really no wonder that New York is the most dysfunctional state in the union, is it? Here's a hint: the race of two unknowns against Sheldon Silver, one of the most powerful men in this state's history, is going to be decided by roughly as many voters as fit in a rush hour subway train. Isn't that at least slightly embarrassing, for everyone who's a citizen of this state? Isn't it cause for reflection that a former Senate minority leader finds himself in a heavily contested primary against a twenty-eight year old, brilliant as the latter may be? What does that say about our political system? How badly are we served by our representatives for that to happen?  read more »