A brief history
by kos
Thu Aug 05, 2004 at 12:54:51 AM PDT
But it did get me thinking about the early days. And since people always ask me how I built this site, here's the answer:
There was once a group of political afficionados who hung out at various political forums -- starting with Delphi Forums, then moving on to ones run by a guy named Orvetti. When Orvetti closed shop, they all moved over en masse to Political Wire, which at the time had comments. But in the runup to the 2002 mid-terms, Taegan got sick of the constant flame wars in his comment threads and he shut them down.
So everyone headed on over to Jerome Armstrong's MyDD, which is where I entered the picture. Digging the site (which I had found via Buzzflash), I decided to start up my own election-themed site, Daily Kos. The site actually lived on fishyshark.com for a month as I tried to come up with a "serious" name for my new endeavour. Even though I eventually settled on "Daily Kos", I considered it a failure at the time -- I thought I should've come up with a more creative name. I selected orange as the site color so that it would stand out from the bloggy masses (branding 101).
In short time I caught Jerome's attention, and we made a habit of linking back to each other on a constant basis. A few months later, Jerome (who invented the "open thread") got sick of the flame wars on his message boards and followed Taegan's lead by shutting his comments down. So everyone headed on over to Daily Kos.
And I was ready. I had learned my lessons from Political Wire and MyDD's community failures, and immediately shut the door on the Republican commentors who had destroyed the previous sites' communities. I zealously worked to create a "safe zone" for liberal political junkies, despite howls of "censorship" from both liberals and conservataives, and the community grew. October 2002, MyDD was the highest-trafficked liberal blog, but Jerome shut down soon thereafter as he focused his attentions on Howard Dean. So Daily Kos became the only liberal election analysis game in town.
But even back then, the site was no longer about me, it was about the community, discussion, and debate. So, few cared when I blew my House and Senate predictions because the fun part had been the discussion. (Though in my lame defense, I did do pretty good with the governors races.)
Bush's War was good for ratings, mine included. By mid-2003, I was feeling the limits of MovableType, and started looking for alternatives, finally settling on Scoop. It took a while to migrate, but that was done by Fall 2003. And despite some grumblings and predictions of doom ("I'll never register!"), the site really took off.
I got many kudos for chosing Scoop, especially the diaries which gave readers a whole new level of ownership with the site. I was genius! Except I wasn't. I chose Scoop because of its community moderation features. I actually didn't think anyone would use the diaries.
So there you have it. Opportunism, mixed in with blind luck and a dose of branding. The secret of my success.
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