Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Reader Blogs

Dear TPM refugees, web surfers, and other assorted riffraff,

I returned from vacation last night and was happy to find a surge of activity from new members and friends from TPM Cafe. Welcome all to dagblog.com.

Like many of you, I first started blogging at TPM Cafe during the 2008 election cycle. I loved the idiosyncratic personalities of the cafe (well...most of them) and the daily intellectual scuffles, but I eventually began to crave more control over my writing platform and more information about my readership. So in the fall of 2008, I joined fellow TPMer Articleman and another friend who went by Deadman to launch dagblog.com. Dag is simply an acronym based on our three screen names. We soon recruited a few other great writers, like TPMers Orlando and DF, but despite enthusiastic suggestions to change the name to dagmodblog, we stuck with dagblog. Deadman and Articleman eventually stopped blogging for personal reasons, thereby rendering the acronym obsolete but for the G. (Rumors about an internal power struggle in which I poisoned Deadman and bit off Articleman's nose are entirely false. Deadman's death has been greatly exaggerated, and Articleman's nose fell off due to natural causes.)

A year ago, one reader requested reader blog functionality. We thought it was a great idea and set it up. In some ways, our reader blogs are similar to those at TPM Cafe. Anyone can register and write about whatever the hell they want to, as long as the content is not spammy, racist, obscene, or mindbogglingly stupid. Obviously, we're flexible on the last one. You can see all reader posts here: http://dagblog.com/reader-blogs.

Unlike TPM, we don't use voting to highlight great writing. Instead, we fully embraced our inner oligarchs and decided to whimsically promote articles that we like to the front page. While this might seem like a dubious honor, dagblog has a couple of hundred regular readers, so the front page placement does offer a larger audience.

In addition to the regular readership, all dagblog posts are indexed by google news (regardless of whether they have been promoted to the front page). If you write about a recent current event, your post may get hundreds or even thousands of hits, especially if it's picked up by other blogs. For instance, a recent piece by newcomer David Seaton received over a thousand hits, and a few dag posts have received over 10,000 hits.

We don't share our traffic data with everyone, but if you start blogging here regularly, I will give you access to the stats. You can see not only how many hits each piece receives but where the traffic comes from. If I haven't gotten around to giving you such access, don't hesitate to send me a request using the contact form.

Please don't hesitate contact me with other problems or questions that you have. I ask you only to be patient. Unlike TPM, dagblog is a budgetless operation. Our ad revenues are paltry, and I manage the technology in my spare time.

That said, I want to make sure that the technology works as smoothly as possible for you all. I plan to do an upgrade this week to make sure that dag can handle the new traffic. The upgrade should also solve the problem with cutting-and-pasting from Microsoft Word.

In the near future, I have a few other ideas for upgrading dagblog and the reader blog section in particular. I would love your feedback and suggestions.

• Richer comments - The sidebar comments worked great when we only had a few comments a day, but it's clearly insufficient to track the richer comments. I welcome suggestions, the simpler the better.
• Multiple reader blog tabs - Currently, you can only view reader blogs chronologically. I'd like to add tabs to view by popularity and editor choice.
• Author pages - If you figure out your user id, you can see a list of your own articles at http://dagblog.com/blog/[id]. I plan to set up a more user friendly url using your screen name.
• New design / logo
• More dagbloggers - In the next few months, we'll probably add more people to headline. I'm not sure when or how many, but I will keep you posted.

By the way, if you want to follow the latest dag posts, you can do so by rss, facebook, twitter, and email. It's all on our subscribe page. (The tweets are broken for some reason. I'll fix them with the upgrade.)

Finally, if you have a personal blog, you are of course welcome to add a link at the bottom of your posts. I'm also happy to add a link to your blog on the the left sidebar, and I ask only that you link back to us.

Thanks again for joining us dagblog. I hope that you find our community as pleasant or perhaps even pleasanter than TPM Cafe and that all your dreams comes true and that you live happily ever after. The end.