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Hecate has a new address

hecatedemeter, Undermining the Patriarchy Every Chance I Get. And I Get a Lot of Chances

Your preferred source for all things Wicca and Pagan. Also poetry.

Call for Solidarity; blogger in distress

Violet is in danger of losing her health insurance. If you want a blogosphere not dominated by a few large blogs, it is necessary to support bloggers like Violet, one of our best feminist bloggers.

Call for blogger solidarity

This post goes out to Duncan Black, Digby, Jane Hamsher, Melissa McEwan, Joshua Micah Marshall, and anyone else with an independent blog with over 10,000 hits a day.

The economy is going to get worse. Many of the small blogs who send you inbound links, and helped to raise up your traffic and page rank, are going to be in serious financial trouble. As in complete destitution. You will be receiving ever more cries for help.

Now the problem for a high profile blogger is not to play favorites. If you link to one fundraiser, then how can you say no to the next one. On the other hand, how can you look away when your blog buddies are losing their homes and going to shelters?

Let me propose a solution. Four times a year, a week before the quarter ends, remind your readers that there are many deserving small blogs who are doing good work and need to be supported. Ask your readers to support their favorite small blog. That way you fulfill your responsibility towards building blogger solidarity without playing favorites. It is up to your readers to decide which small blog they want to support. They might choose ones you have never heard of. And it is a good way to remind everyone that we are trying to build a movement.

And there is another reason to do it towards the end of the quarter. That is the time we hear from all the politicians begging us to give them a last minute boost. This will be a sharp reminder that they have done nothing to help ordinary Americans and that you are going to use your very limited bloggy powers to do what you can to ameliorate suffering among your readers.

Just a thought.

How to build a people’s media

What danps said:

What we need is our own media. We need to create and encourage independent outlets, and have people committed to original reporting. That might mean cell phone pictures instead of high definition SLRs, or hastily typed dispatches from the scene instead of regurgitations of conventional wisdom from afar presented on an expensive layout. It is more gritty and not as slick and polished, but it is infinitely more real.

We need our media sewn together with an understanding of which things hold promise and which ones are dead ends we have already traveled down – ideally with a commitment to punching up and taking on bigger opponents. …

… You should donate to Corrente because we are the media, and because the same sensibility that has prompted a very committed group to seize and hold a public space for several weeks running has also prompted lambert and the gang to keep at it for years now. If you believe in what Occupy is doing by routing around a broken political environment and insisting on something new, you should also support Corrente – a site committed to routing around a broken media environment. A movement like Occupy needs outlets like Corrente. If you support the former I hope you’ll support the latter.

Some personal words, lambert does not just blog about solidarity, he practices it. I do not know of any other blog with a daily readership of 3,000 hits a day that does so much to promote small blogs like this one. But even with that this blog is read almost entirely by people coming in on key word searches.

I feel strongly about Medicare for All (also known as single payer). Blogging at Corrente gave me the ability to reach hundreds of readers and give much needed visibility to single payer web sites. We also had the chance to do live blogs with Katie Robbins and Dr. Margaret Flowers. It is thrilling to be one of Corrente’s health care correspondents.

And for a little blog, Corrente is very ambitious. We put on the Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-Conference. lambert introduced Modern Monetary Theory to political blogosphere.

Now lambert and the Corrente community are following the Occupy movement with live reporting whenever possible and link collecting that documents the movement’s growth. I am especially proud of the fact that Corrente followed Occupy Wall Street that first crucial week when there were only a few hundred demonstrators. There was a total medial blackout by the American news media and frankly very little blog coverage. There were diaries at the Big Cheeto, but no Front Page items. Firedoglake, Suburban Guerrilla, and Corrente were the only ones covering it before the pepper spray incident. That is why we urgently need Corrente.

Corrente is lamberts only income. He is having his annual fundraiser, please give generously.

DCist rumormongering

Permitless Protesters Could Move To McPherson Square

Actually, no. They plan to stay until we are out of Afghanistan.

Dancing on Our Occupation Permit

The DCist had only to look at the web site to ascertain this. So clearly you cannot believe what is posted at the DCist.

Blogging the bail out

Compendium of Corrente Wire’s efforts to stop the hold up.

The problem with tinyURL

Lambert

Oh, and tiny URLs are evil, for two reasons I keep meaning to post on: (1) Ideally, a URL should be self-documenting (like ours) for the sake of the reader; but more importantly (2) the Internet scales because there is no central authority through which URLs must pass in order to be decoded. However, tinyURLs are such an authority, so they break the architecture. This “service” should not be encouraged.

On the other hand, what are you going to do if you want to email a link and the fool developers designed a 300 character URL?

Open inviation to French Doc

French Doc, who writes the always fascinating Global Sociology Blog used to blog at Corrente Wire. She got discouraged with the Presidential election and left us. I hope she will return to Corrente Wire as she has a great deal of insight.

Responding to violence in our community

The violence in the District is out of control

A man and a woman from Falls Church are in car near Howard University. Six men approach in what may have been an attempted vehicle hijacking. A gun is fired and the woman passenger, 47-year-old Barbara Carl, is killed. A life ends just like that. By pointing out Ms. Carl’s murder, I don’t mean to otherwise minimize the near daily slaughter of young men and women in the city. On the same day that Ms. Carl was attacked, Robert Mallory, 19, SE, was shot and killed. But at what point do we say that there’s either something seriously dysfunctional with the city’s response or we need to call in the National Guard to augment police? This is a city where the violence is so bad that vehicle checkpoints were recently put in one neighborhood, Trinidad. More relevant to this audience: Can a city of bloggers bring about change? After the shooting in Adams Morgan last week, I walked by the scene, looked at the blood on the sidewalk and watched people walk by, the rhythms of life seemingly intact. The newspapers deliver the facts; it’s the bloggers who have the power to humanize it before the violence is disassembled into the routine. There are thousands of blogging voices in the District, many with great gifts, insights and the ability to reshape the perspectives of their readers. But for all that we are trying to do as bloggers, we are not doing enough. — kob

It is a good question. Bloggers can respond to this with a kind of detail that the commercial media either cannot or will not put into it.