Field goal / Lightning Jazz / Daily Kos (Friday Cat/Concert/Better Know a Blog Blogging #2)

Friday Catblogging
The kick is up, and it's GOOD!!! The Giants win the ballgame and claim the final playoff spot in the NFC!!!

Friday's Concert Clip
Having started out the week on a rather blasphemous kick (Monday we looked at how our independence seems to vanish in the haze; Wednesday we tried imagining there's no heaven; Tomorrow we're going Across the Universe), this week's musical clip seemed pretty obvious, and no, it's not actually going to be a Beatles song. Instead, we're going with Dan Bern's "Lighning Jazz", a.k.a. "Hey God, How's It Hanging Tough Guy?". If you're browser is being kind, you can go to his

March 28, 2004 show

at Joe's Pub in NYC, which is available, free and completely legal, from Archive.org's etree service, and try track 15 using the embedded player that should open up in the upper right corner of the page. If that fails, you can download the song directly using

this link to the MP3 file.

Again, this is completely legal; many smaller folk artists encourage people to tape their shows and distribute them, and they encourage you to spread their music as widely as possible. Honestly, check out all the songs from this set. I'd name my favorites, but I love most of them, and much of the fun is in the discovery. If you like his stuff, you can buy it here.

Better Know a Blog
Well, I put it off for a week, but this week we go with the grand-daddy of them all: Daily Kos. To explain the name, "kos" is the online handle of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who created the blog after being a prominent poster at MyDD, which is also in our blogroll to the right. Daily Kos, though, cannot be defined by just one person; it has grown to be the largest liberal political blog in the country, if not the largest of any political stripe, because it is a community effort. Thanks to an amazing software package known as "Scoop", anyone can register for an account at dKos and post one diary per day about anything they want. If you like what someone else has written, you can comment on their diary, or on one of the main page stories, leading to active discussion threads that can reach up to hundreds of comments. You can quickly make online friends (or enemies, I suppose), finding kindred spirits who share your particular interests. Several prominent diarists are chosen each year to be "Frontpagers", who, along with Kos himself, get to post stories to the main page, typically about politics, but not exclusively. One of last year's frontpagers, DarkSyde, rose to prominence by writing a weekly popular science column, and throughout last year had a bigger science readership than just about any other writer in the nation, hundreds of thousands of readers per week.

Separating dKos from many of the other liberal political blogs is its focus on electoral politics. Simply put, it is not really a policy forum. Long-term strategies and position papers are often mentioned, but the organizing principle behind the "Kossack" community is electing Democrats, primarily those from the progressive wing of the party, and trying to grow a grass-roots progressive movement that can become a force in American politics. This is not just a pipe-dream; a collaboration between dKos, MyDD, and the Swing State Project helped to raise $1.5 MILLION dollars last cycle through the online Democratic fundraising website Act Blue. The approach they take, which encourages debate and embraces partisanship, strongly frowning on Democrats who attack other Democrats (paging Joseph Lieberman!), stands in marked contrast to traditional democratic single-issue groups (NARAL; Sierra Fund, etc.) that try to acheive policy goals through a bipartisan approach that failed pretty miserably under the previous Republican leadership, since moderate Republicans often gave nice speeches but supported a leadership that blocked any pro-choice, pro-environment or pro-labor bill from ever seeing the light of day.

Dkos takes some getting used to, as it is a pre-existing and tight knit community, but it does contain more content than just about any other blog out there, admittedly with a lower signal to noise ratio than most. If you are feeling unadventurous, check out the Recommended Diaries in the upper right; these are the diaries from the past few hours of which the community itself thinks most highly (they're chosen by you, the viewer!). If you like what you see, lurk for a while and then sign up for an account. Heck, I may even cross-post some of the entries from here over there sometime, to reel in more unsuspecting innocents into our dastardly schemes, just as soon as I figure out what we're dastardly scheming.