You may have noticed, but I've sort of been scarce since the election. While I did fit two short vacations in these past two months (a couple of days to San Diego with the kids, and a couple of days to Las Vegas without the kids), I've actually been pretty busy.
2008 was a good election year for us electorally, of course, but it was also a good year for this site. We easily broke $1 million in revenues, which have allowed us to do a bunch of cool new things:
- Professionalize. For a long time, Jeremy the tech dude was my only paid staff. As of now, Daily Kos has a paid staff of eight. SusanG is Executive Editor, BarbinMD is Associate Editor, Kagro is editor of Congress Matters, I have a business manager (Will), Brownsox will be a key part of a new project we'll be launching soon, Hunter is hard at work with DK4, and me and Jeremy round things off. The executive team (me, Susan, and Will) also share a new part-time assistant. On top of it all, Kos Media employees now get full benefits. That may seem trite or trivial for you guys, but for me, it's a huge accomplishments. Benefits are expensive.
- New products. We recently launched Congress Matters, which will help us understand and hopefully impact the sausage-making process in Congress, and we have two new projects we hope to launch in Q1 this year. Last year, we invested significantly in our Electoral Scoreboard, and we plan to continue adding features to what I think was the coolest election widget in 2008. When we get done with the next round of revisions (more historical election results, overlaid census data, and lots of small updates and additions), it will be the coolest election widget ever.
- Polling. In 2008, Daily Kos ran 100 battleground horserace polls, and 55 daily presidential tracking polls. Those 155 polls made Daily Kos the largest media polling operation in the country. Think about it -- this little "blog" commissioned and ran more polls than the bigshot traditional media types.
And while most media organizations have gone into polling slumber for 2009, we already bought a block of 150 polls for this year -- 100 horserace polls (you've started seeing them already), and 50 weekly "State of the Nation" polls (MoE 2%!) that will track the favorability ratings of Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Boehner, McConnell, the Democratic and Republican parties, and Congressional Democrats and Congressional Republicans. Pretty bad-ass, huh? We've got results from last week, which should go live today, and moving forward will be updated every Friday.
- DK4. The new, redesigned from the ground-up version of Daily Kos was supposed to launch last year. However, I moved resources (money and time) into the polling and Electoral Scoreboards, and I decided it would be foolish to try and launch the new re-engineered Daily Kos in the midst of a high-traffic election. So we pushed it off. However, development work on the new platform is back on track, and it looks like we got the designers of this version of Daily Kos back for the redesign. I warn you all -- the new Daily Kos will be a marked departure from this one, and everyone will hate it and I'll be accused of having jumped the shark (it happens every time I make a major refresh on this site). But once everyone gets used to the new digs, you'll realize it's bad-ass and will have taken this blogging platform to a whole new level. One example of a change everyone will like: The one-diary-a-day limit will be eliminated.
So when will DK4 arrive? Not sure yet, but I'd say late Q2 or early Q3. We'll probably have a fairly long beta period to test, since it's a complete ground-up rewrite of the software, and should be buggy as hell.
So while I was scarce on the site, I wasn't scarce on the planning. We've got a big year ahead of us product-wise, not to mention navigating the tough economic climate. Most of those ducks are finally in a row, and I'm rested from writing. So bottom line, while I was never really gone, I'm back.
Update: Ack! Yet another reason I suck as a boss? I forgot to include one of our staffers -- Jed Lewison, who is close to launching a killer new product for Daily Kos. I suck.