by CKR
First of all, don’t use a black background. This may be a prejudice of mine, but I find the glaring white words on Dipnotes hard to read. The charcoal-gray background for posts mitigates this somewhat, but when I go back to a white background, my eyeballs are seared.
Second, the latest posts go at the top. Your software probably has an easy way to change this. The latest comments go at the bottom. Blogging has been around long enough to develop some conventions, and this chronology is one of them.
I’ve gotten a comment from one Dipnotes observer that the nuclear question was timely. I’ll agree with that, but I would like to see an attempt at intelligent conversation on a blog from the State Department. Or anywhere, but that’s a bit much to ask. Giving no background, not even a link to the treaty being discussed (and which is quite easy to read), guarantees that the discussion will be incoherent.
There are only a few reasons I comment on blogs. First is to further a discussion. I do this when it appears that the poster has given the subject some thought. If I know the poster from previous interactions, so much the better, and I will add in humor and other ways of introducing color into the discussion. Sometimes it’s to get noticed. I do this on more highly trafficked blogs, but only when I feel that what I have to say contributes to the discussion. Usually it’s also only if I arrive at the top of the comments. This is also known as blogwhoring. Occasionally, it’s to correct a deep misapprehension. I’ve mostly given this up because commenters, particularly later in a thread, happily take leave of the factual world.
Institutional blogs are, in general, boring. Newspapers have introduced many, many of them, and they seldom have the bite or individuality of blogs run by, er, real people. I read very few of them regularly, but it might be informative to consider the ones that I do.
First and foremost, Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com. Froomkin does an enormous amount of work to provide links to and excerpts from articles in the MSM and blogosphere relating to the presidency. I’m not pleased that wapo has eliminated the one-page version, but Froomkin is worth the page-clicking.
Next, Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly. Kevin was an independent blogger before WM picked him up. He has kept a snappy style, with commentary on the news and his famous Friday Catblogging.
Those are the only two institutional blogs on my regular daily rounds of the Web. Froomkin has no comment feature, although he seems to be attentive to his e-mail. I find the comments on Drum’s blog to have the same boring quality that any comments from a wide audience do. Very occasionally there is a gem, but the early ones are mostly predictable, and predictably scrappy later.
There are two more that I look at, maybe once or twice a week: FP Passport and Early Warning. Siddarth Varadarajan’s Reality, One Bite at a Time is a useful compendium of his articles written for The Hindu.
There are several other institutional blogs that I read from time to time, but mostly when someone else links to them. These include The Swamp, Swampland (these two say all I need to say about originality in these blogs), The Note, The Huffington Post, and Andrew Sullivan, who, like Kevin Drum, began as an independent. That’s about it.
And no, please no, I don’t want to read about Karen Hughes’s cat.