blog.jpgThe Politico yesterday that really impacted me. Entitled, “GOP lags on the Internet frontier,” it was also about social conservatives lagging behind social liberals on the blogosphere:

But Patrick Ruffini, the former e-campaign director for the Republican National Committee (and briefly an adviser to the Rudy Giuliani campaign), argues that there’s a deeper problem on the Republican side of the online equation.
He notes that conservatives don’t lack for their own YearlyKos, as thousands of right-wingers have been gathering for years at the annual CPAC conference. And he argues that in sheer traffic terms, sites like the Drudge Report and Free Republic still outdraw their left-wing competitors – which is true….

To Ruffini, the Republican problem online is rooted in an older culture that has stopped innovating and has failed to embrace the sort of cooperative networking practices and freewheeling activism that collectively has produced so much new energy on the Democratic side.
“Drudge has made clear he disdains blogs,” Ruffini writes on his blog. “The site looks the same as it did in 1997…. There is no interactivity on Drudge. You go there, read, refresh, and that’s it.” As for Free Republic, Ruffini points to a whole set of things the site’s owners have done that have stifled the formation of a vibrant community.
“The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible…. Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a ‘vanity’ and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by [the site’s owner]…. What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions and to raise money for conservative candidates.”

I realized these authors are right. I peruse pro-abort blogs often, looking for fodder and to simply read their diaries, and I’ve noticed they often link to one another’s posts and congratulate or add additional thoughts to them.
I also noticed when reading Hugh Hewitt’s book Blog a couple years ago, when I was trying to get a handle on all this, that he was very generous with links and accolades to other bloggers. And he is a very successful blogger, as is Michelle Malkin, who also links a lot
I haven’t checked other pro-life blogs very often because I haven’t had time. It’s hard to keep up on news and what pro-aborts are up to, never mind read what your own people are saying.
But I decided to clean up my blogroll this morning – add a couple and delete those that were defunct or stale – and I read lots of good stuff in the process.
So I’m working on posting an entry every day or two or three that spotlights noteworthy posts from other blogs.
With that in mind, do you have a favorite pro-life blog you’d like to pass along?
I’m also interested in knowing which pro-abort blogs you read.

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