Tom Watson

A Year in the Life

Late last summer, a motley group of lefties gathered in conference calls, on email and via instant message. Geeks, wonks, gurus, visionaries, artists, revolutionaries, and bloggers all. And one board member - me. The task: take the rising tide of progressive thought behind the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and get real heavy into the blogosphere.

More accurately, the job was to fill a void in all the feeds, posts, links, pings and comments out there in politics land, left and right - the void of serious attention to actual policy, especially among progressive bloggers. After all, our working motto at DMI has always been that if nobody reads what you write, nothing changes. So we had to be a bigger part of the fascinating conversation.

Last October, DMIblog was born as a multi-author site on a wide variety of policy topics, but minus the usual rants about day-to-day electoral politics and personalities. From the start, our little working group got the architecture right. It was open, it had a bunch of terrific voices, and it got a response. As Andrea said in the kick-off post:

This blog is a laboratory for ideas. We already know the power of Blogs to take down politicians; now let's explore the power of Blogs to take on the tired orthodoxies of the right...and the left.

The response, in my view, has been eveyrything we hoped for and more. The blog has had 1,360 comments and counting, 1,053,480 pageviews, 503,783 sessions and best of all, 54 individual bloggers. But the numbers don't tell the whole story. A few weeks ago, I sat in the press room with a bunch of bloggers at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. A few of them knew me from my blog, but every last one of them was a fan of DMIblog and they spoke in glowing terms about our mission of blogging policy from a progressive point of view. We know from inbound links that the word is getting out there. Our bloggers committee helped DMI at our annual fundraising reception, and stuck around to discuss netroots and policy over a few beers aferwards.

So happy anniversary to us! Special thanks to Andrea and Elana, to our Web team behind the scenes, and to all of the regulars and guests (you can see their names down the right side), and most of all the those who comment and link and discuss. That's the whole reason for doing this. It was a quick year, with so many issues to discuss. We're trying to change the conversation. Please stick around and help us - and pass the link along.

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Posted at 11:37 AM, Oct 12, 2006 in Media
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