Nora and our friends at Hardball are going to have the
Hardbloggers working hard at the Leiberman-Lamont debate as they live ... errr..
hardblog it ... or something. I'm not sure exactly why anyone with a video camera at a major news network would want to
blog the debate, or even
hardblog it, if it's being shown live on TV.
Here's my best advice to the Hardbloggers hardblogging away at Hardball's hardblogging HQ: we sincerely appreciate the attention paid to both our media and our community. We like you. We like MSNBC in general and we like guys like Olbermann immensely. But if I may be so bold as to speak for a few bloggers across the nation .... I think you guys should stick to broadcasting and comment. We'll do the blog'n.
You-->broadcast and comment. We--->blog.
It's not that we don't appreciate the impact we're having, we're grateful for the notice. It's just that when you guys try and 'blog' anything it
just makes us look bad by association. And worse, to many of us, it makes you look about as fashionably hip as a middle-aged, balding guy clothed in off the rack, fake grunge-wear and leering at seventeen year-olds in an over and under Seattle nightclub. Anyone who knows what a blog is and reads them frequently would laugh at network attempts to emulate them, and since most people don't know what a blog is, they have no idea what you're talking about in the first place. So the only reason you could possibly be
hardblogging is because you think it makes you look and sound cool. And guys, I've seen
hardblogger and it's NOT cool. In fact, if I were to judge it solely as a
blog, it's
painfully bad, so bad I hope you didn't pay for it. Anyone who's been writing and tagging here on Dkos for more than a month could probably do better.
Besides, the only reason we're using blogs is because some of you big traditional media stars fell down on the job and forced us to resort to the Internet to get news that wasn't being covered. You've come a long way in regaining that credibility simply by covering the news you'd been avoiding. We'll happily promote you, remind people about you, and link you, if you follow through on that simple task. That's all you have to do.
It's not the title that makes you a blogger, it's the blogging that makes you a blogger. If you wanna be a blogger by all means, come on in. I don't think you'll like writing for free and having to defend every word, at least not as much as making hundreds of thousands a year and being insulated from criticism. But if that's what you want, put up a site with constantly updating content and comments and links and illustrations, see if you can hang for a few months, and we'll call you bloggers. But crossing out W-E-B-S-I-T-E and writing in B-L-O-G is still obviously a website, even if it has a cool name like hardblogger. When you create a false 'blog' and promote it as the real McCoy, even with a bitch'n marketable sounding name like hardblogger, it just makes us snicker at you.
This is a live blog. This is not. And no, an email form propped up like it's a comment window sure as hell isn't going to fool anyone who blogs ... crimany what are you thinking?
Please, please, I beg you, either hire a real blogger--which would probably cost you all of ten bucks an hour--and actually do what they tell you to do, or just stop.