I like Ed and Allah too.  They catch a lot of abuse.  But they try to go a very decent job and while I do not always agree on their take on things, Hot Air is a great resource site to go to.   And I like new addition Tina Korbe too.  They are not the be all and end all.  A broad site like that, even with three bloggers is not going to get into the details of things as other sites do.  That is normal.  

A bas l’ ISP! Laissez les tumbrils roulez! Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! Les bandes-broades pour tout le monde, gratis! Tabernac! Montez le firewall!

Deborah Leigh said…Hey, this here’s America! We don’t speak no froggy gibberish. So please put your sentiments in the language of the Founders. And keep in mind that there might be kids (really smart kids) reading this thread, so no-no on mounting the firewall.

*meh* Blogging is many things to many people, and there are enough niches for whatever one’s purpose for blogging may be. Once upon a time, the TTLB ranking had some cachet in certain circles, and for a brief time, I was enamored of my exhalted ranking in that venue. 

These things pass, and I returned to my roots: blogging to quell the voices in my head. *heh*I read devour many genres of blogs: political, social/philosophical/theological, humor, downright weird. There’s plenty of room for expression. So, some self-absorbed “New Media” area seems to be dominated by a few Big Voices. Who frickin’ cares, well, except for folks so consumed with self-importance (or weak-egos consumed with projecting their own importance–same-same, IMO) that the attention of others is what defines their very selves.

Why haven’t you posted this famous tome to Amazon?
My novel is stuck at 35k, with little hope of follow-on attention until after the election.

I have it on some authority that the number of applicants for blogger credentials was in the hundreds. The CPAC organizers can’t tell the difference between LMA and LGF–even our own blogroll here is a zoo.

(a) After a while, CPAC starts to lose money because there are too many zero-cost attendees. Or, maybe, whatever advertising value the bloggers add isn’t enough to cover network costs.

(b) Someone, thus has to be empowered to be the bastard who, imperfectly, gets to give some the nod and whisks others to the cornfield. I know TLC well, and it sucked to see her get the boot.

(c) The no-value-added response is to go all tinfoil hat over what amounts to an economics problem. We’re human, we have emotions. I, too, have been kicked. In the face. When I was down. By an iron boot. Not this particular time, but I was sucking it up in Afghanistan for CPAC11, so maybe it’s ‘fair’.

(d) The value-added response is to come up with a proposal for no-kidding bloggers to do our own vetting. Maybe there is a lottery for the available seats. Maybe there is a rider fee that can be applied to increase availability. Maybe bloggers can sell CPAC registrations in exchange for a free admission. I daresay that a reasonable, adult proposal that maximizes the value that blogs add to CPAC, while minimizing the administrative overhead, may find favor.
Just some thoughts.

 Well, because honestly, its a roughly 800 page mess. It really, really needs a rewrite. Like I said, I just wrote the first draft. It’s good for a first draft, in my opinion, but I’m no Dostoevsky.

You want English!  OK!

THE RISE OF THE SECOND TIER BLOGGERS!

http://tinyurl.com/77t4yyb

Mine? “Boy meets girl in Afghanistan.”
An unrepentantly Christian romance. 
I daresay your chief uses for such may be inducing vomiting, or emergency heating.

 If it has monsters eating people’s faces, I will happily read it.

 I’m going to hazard a guess he never does get in that burqa, right? Or is she a fellow American soldier? There’s a lot to work with there, and you having spent time there you have a lot of experience to draw from.

Yeah. . .no.
The plot effort to put the characters together is substantial. Where would you really do a sex scene on a FOB? A porta-potty? A CONEX box?
Even if I have a shred of interest in writing smut, the details wouldn’t work.

Back when I used to attend to American Film Markets in Santa Monica, all the players, the machers, had suites, and lounges and tons of support. 

To get to them, you had to get through the lobby. which was crowded with novice producers and 1st-film makers and washed-up old lags looking for one last score.  Not unlike the marketplaces in Calcutta and New Delhi with maybe a bit less hygiene and damn sure a lot less good karma.

Maybe what we need is a LobbyCon for we smaller bloggers, where we can meet each other and learn from each other what’s been working for us before we start worrying about  installing our own server farms and how to get Harry Reid to return our calls.

I hear you. I also have a story to tell from back in the day.

Back in the day, I was a freelance music journalist (as least that’s what I called it), doing record reviews and artist interviews. I specialized in contemporary Christian music, so naturally most of the publications I wrote for were Christian magazines. One of them wasn’t; it was a freebie given away by a record store chain. At this particular magazine I was as bottom rung as it gets, getting an article of any kind in there maybe three times a year. But I did my best.

Every once in a while, someone at the magazine would remember I existed and would call me to rag on me about whatever (apparently I didn’t use enough profanity for them). However, occasionally during these once in a whiles they’d “suggest” I interview an artist. Sometimes they were on Christian labels, sometimes regular ones. And so off I’d go, marching orders in hand, to contact someone in PR at the label in question to set up an interview.

Invariably, it’d take multiple phone calls to the Christian labels, with messages left every time, plus a fax or two (shows how long ago this was) before someone would get back to me. Once they did — if they did — they’d go out of their way to make sure they did the bare minimum to set up the interview, never providing the required amount of time to do it right and making sure everything was at my expense. Considering I was trying to help them sell records by promoting their artist, this always struck me as a trifle on the odd side.

Were it a regular label, no matter its size the head of PR would get back to me no later than the next day, interview details in hand and asking what I needed so it’d be done. And it was done.

Now, there is no way you can convince me that even with doubtless a larger staff to handle things, the workload at a regular label with an active artist roster ten times that of a Christian label, and far, far more demand for media interaction with those artists, was not vastly greater. Yet they would make sure that yours truly, as noted a small fry among small fry, was taken care of. In fact, they’d invariably spend far more time on the phone with me than the PR people at the Christian labels even though by all definitions we were from two different worlds.

Long story is yes, I understand busy. I also understand professionalism and meeting the demands of your position. To me, and for me, Mr. Morrissey falls very short in both these regards.

 If it’s supernatural stuff doing the killing, I may still like it, but if it’s evil human beings doing it, well that kind of stuff creeps me out because there is so much of it in reality already. Horror about people being evil scares me, horror about monsters and other things I am not likely to see in real life is fun. For example, I like just about every cheezy B-movie with bad acting on sci-fi involving monsters, but movies like Saw scare me, and not in the fun way.
However, there is a market for gory horror with people doing awful things to each other, so even if it isn’t my taste, I am sure you will find a decent audience.

 Zilla-It’s got both, evil humans and the supernatural.

I think the most important factor is the quality of the readers, because you cannot get any better than us.

Cheers