Beltway Bloggers
Personal Politics Turn Communal on a Web of Local Internet Sites
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2004; Page E01
When the D.C. Council held a public hearing on the proposed smoking ban for District bars and restaurants, more than a hundred people showed up to voice their opinions. Ban the Ban, a group organized by local bloggers, brought 25 people to testify on that December workday.
Zoe Mitchell, who led the online campaign, says the Ban the Ban turnout that day is proof that blogs are more than a wasteland of rhetoric. A veteran protester at 23, Mitchell has stormed congressional offices, marched against the war in Iraq and traveled the country attending anti-globalization rallies. She is trying to change the world; she believes that keeping a blog, a kind of online diary, will help.
Washington's blogsphere is a galaxy of local Web writers who are tied to their computers and to their connections with each other. There are plenty of gossipy teen blogs and "what-I-had-for-lunch" journals, but like the city itself, Washington's blog scene has a strong base of politicos.
Surfing through directories of Washington bloggers (several exist, including DCbloggers.com and the DC Metro Blog Map, a site that lists bloggers according to the nearest Metro stop) it is hard to miss the preponderance of politically charged blogs. Dedicated, like-minded bloggers have even founded circles of sites that link to one another and discuss similar topics. The Beltway Bloggers fall to the right. The Cato Blog Mafia consists of current and former employees of the Cato Institute. There are wonkish policy blogs, environmental blogs and libertarian blogs. Blogs that promoted the DC primary and track happenings in District education.
Web logs allow people with little technical know-how to create elaborate, quickly updated Internet sites at almost no expense. The growing ease of the technology has enticed hundreds (possibly thousands) of local residents to take their passions to the Web.
Blogging is a lifestyle, the most devoted say, and like the telephone or e-mail, can quickly become a second-nature method of communication.
One afternoon last week James Joyner trolled through the headlines on Google News, and learned that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of gay marriage. The Ashburn resident, who describes himself as a libertarian-leaning conservative, clicked through to the USA Today story on the ruling and decided to add it to his blog, Outside the Beltway.
A quick right-click of his mouse brings up a box giving Joyner, who uses a software system called Moveable Type, the option to link the story to his blog. He writes a couple of paragraphs of commentary and hits the "publish" button, sending an update to his blog. The whole process is done in about 10 minutes. There are options to change the way the text appears and some blogs are fancier than others, but very little technical prowess is actually required, he said.
Within hours Joyner received more than a dozen e-mails notifying him that readers had commented on that post. The replies go up on the site automatically, but Joyner can read the text in his e-mail and if there is a tawdry remark, he has the power to remove it. His site gets between 1,000 and 1,500 hits a day, mostly from people Joyner has never met.
"You get interaction going, discussions. People can get sort of heated and start calling each other names," said Joyner, 38, a former political science professor.
Joyner will sometimes post to his blog 25 times a day and regularly reads between 30 and 40 other blogs. The activity takes up to an hour or two of his time on weekdays, and while he says most of it is done at home, Joyner admits that he probably blogs more than he should from the office.
Joyner says he'd be reading the news anyway, and reasons that blogging is actually complementary to his job as a nonfiction editor for Brassey's Inc., a Dulles book publisher. "I'm trying to sign authors for books. Part of my job is finding out what the hot topics are," he explained.
Why spend so much time on what Joyner contends is "just a hobby?" It is simply a way to connect, many bloggers say, and can create a sense of community.
"It's definitely a community. You would tend to think that a technology like this would make it easier for people to avoid personal interaction, but it's just actually the opposite," said P.J. Doland, a member of the Cato Blog Mafia and author of a blog called the Frosty Mug Revolution.
A list of links to D.C. bloggers is a near-mainstay on most local blog sites, allowing bloggers to quickly reference each other. There are regular Friday night happy hours at Atomic Billiards, a Cleveland Park bar, where bloggers can put a face to a screen name. And member-only Yahoo user groups and e-mail lists allow Washington bloggers to privately discuss the craft and local blog gossip.
"When you have a theory or a concern, telling people over the phone, it's not that effective, but put it on your blog and you can tell the whole world," said Alexis Rice, a fellow with the Center for American Government at Johns Hopkins University who is studying the use of technology in presidential campaigns.
Mitchell, a member of the D.C. Statehood Green Party, discovered that in early October when she posted a lengthy anti-smoking-ban essay on her personal blog, A Ten, A Five, and Five Ones. The site got more than 3,000 hits that day, triple its normal volume.
"I posted that thing and all these other bloggers in town and other political activists that were opposed to the ban started e-mailing me saying 'Are you going to found a group? When are you going to meet?' " she recalled.
Days later Mitchell, with the help of other local bloggers, launched Ban the Ban, a blog she hoped would become a platform for action. She and a team of fellow bloggers updated the blog daily with news and research about the impact bans in other cities were having on bar and restaurant sales.
They added a link so that readers could e-mail D.C. Council members; sold coffee mugs and T-shirts bearing the organization's logo; created an e-mail update list; and added a credit card transaction function for donations. Unlike a static Web site, the blog changed constantly, giving readers a reason to visit more frequently. Eventually the group met in person, organized bar crawls to raise money and canvassed local service workers who supported their cause. But the blog remained the center point of the campaign.
"I said if we're going to win this, we have to fight it first, we have to fight it using technology and logic and economic argument," Mitchell said.
The day before the public hearing, council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large) proposed counter-legislation that would provide fiscal incentives to businesses that voluntarily went smoke-free. Seven out of the council's 13 members sponsored the less restrictive bill, making it far more likely to be passed, although no action yet has been taken.
Schwartz said her opinion was not influenced by any one group, and Ban the Ban doesn't claim to be solely responsible for defeating the bill banning smoking. But Mitchell says attendance at the hearing is proof that blogs can affect life outside the virtual world.
"What blogging is really useful for is making connections between disparate kinds of people," Mitchell said.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company |
