You want to know what was so remarkable about YearlyKos? It was the people! They were ordinary. Take away the people running for office, and what you had was a lot of very ordinary people. No rock stars, no movie actors, no one with any reason to expect a national stage. This was a group of ordinary people doing the extraordinary.
How amazing was YearlyKos? What did a lot of regular people do in Las Vegas that was so remarkable?
We got NOTICED!
The Chairman of the Democratic Party noticed us. Senators, Congressmen, Govenors, and candidates for President noticed us. The Media noticed us.
Out of the ranting, out of the pie fights and troll wars comes a force to be reckoned with. People. People with ideas. People with ideas and energy. A force for change.
There are lots of political blogs out there, but it wasn't until 2006 that one of them was large enough to have a national conference that attracted this kind of attention. This was our event. What could 1000 plus people do to propel Marcos into national prominence? How could we have managed to get a presence on C-Span, Meet the Press, and Countdown?
We have known the quality of the members of the Kos community for a long time. We understand how individual members rise to the top of the recommended diaries with quality writing. We are in awe of the investigative reports that reveal so much of what is happening around us. We reach a greater understanding of our world because of the topics discussed here. We expand our awareness because of the diversity of people and ideas here.
So why did we get noticed? Because we can all contribute to DailyKos. We can read, we can write, we can comment. Ideas are exchanged, discussed, and tested. The best ideas, the best comments, the best writers get noticed online. So after honing our discussions online, we took it to Vegas, and we got noticed. We started out planning a group hug and went overboard. We showed what a group of regular people could do when they focus their energy on a goal. And we didn't do it by ourselves. For every person at YearlyKos there were 10 wishing they could have been there.
So now we know how to create buzz. Congratulations. We got noticed. Extraordinary.