David Rothman points to a Daily KOS story that points to a MyDD story titled “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.” What’s the point? Of the top 40 political blogs, more than half are ‘liberal,’ and more importantly, they support community involvement — including basic features like comments — that the conservative blogs shun.

of the five most trafficked conservative blogs (over 200,000 page views per week), only one [...] even allows comments…

[...]

Community moderated blogging platforms [...] have provided us with an excellent means of finding new voices, and these are the voices that are generating the accelerated growth in the liberal and progressive blogosphere when compared to the right-wing blogosphere.

Chris Bowers may have a point. He’s certainly got the numbers and I suggest taking a look at the links above to get the full weight of the story.

Though I’ve had my own frustrations with comments here, I keep them open because I believe that honest debate is the center of democracy. I keep them open despite my concerns about the tone of comments in stories like this, and despite the comments from conservative snipers in a number of my political stories. Republicans are working hard to stifle debate in our traditional news media and our universities, it’s no surprise they’re doing the same for new media too.

Technorati Tags: aristocratic, blog, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, chris bowers, comment, comments, community, conservative, daily kos, dailykos, david rothman, debate, democrat, differences, difference, honest debate, liberal, mydd, politics, progressive, republican, snipers, stifle, story

I had just sat down to post a note about an interview with J.D. Lasica in On The Media (listen to MP3) this week when I found David Rothman beat me to it. The interview was one of the better treatments of copyright issues that’s I’ve heard/seen in the (relatively-) popular media.

Here’s the summary from the OTM site:

For every move that media industries have taken to protect their copyrights, there has been an equal and opposite countermove by consumers. In Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation, J.D. Lasica explores the realm in which so-called pirates operate – slicing, dicing, and sharing media to their hearts’ content. Lasica talks to Bob about how Hollywood is driving consumers further into the shadows and under the radar.

One of the best features of OTM interview, is the way they ran it along side a story about Backstage BBC, the new developer interface/API for the worlds most popular news website. How’d it work? It worked because — just like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and others — they saw value in opening up their copyrighted material to see how others might “remix” it.

But because Rothman reported on the Darknet/Lasica interview first and better, I’m taking the easy way out by throwing down a few links and calling it good:

Lasica’s book: Darknet.

Lasica on Darknets –“private, encrypted spaces where social groups can communicate with each other and exchange files.” His concept, ten examples, and Wikipedia’s take.

Lasica on digital libraries: top 10 assaults on digital liberties.

Technorati Tags: api, bbc, bbc backstage, copyright, copyright issues, copyrights, darknet, david rothman, developer interface, on the media