Anarchogeek

Swiftboat Vets, Bottom Up Media, Keeping Stories Alive, and the Establishment

Today i came across an blog post / article about the swift boat vets, blogs, and journalism establishment. The argument is that professional journalists don't like switfboat vet folks because they are liars and aren't following proper channels to promote their agenda. What they are doing is going on cable news, and getting a lot of play from right wing bloggers. Jay Rosen who maintains the very interesting PressThink blog agues that this is another reflection of how participatory media are reshaping the media environment as laid out in Dan Gillmor's We The Media. I still haven't read We The Media, but i find the arguments interesting.

We on the far left, and yes we are the far left, do similar things. We've been doing it for years. Keeping stories alive, or making them through our own media networks. This is what indymedia is about, organizing leftists to coherently make their own media to advance political campaigns. It's also to a degree what MoveOn does when they invite thousands of budding media activists to make advertising for them.

It's interesting the effect small indyblogs has had. It has taken a group of us, who are all very small time bloggers, and given us a common platform. Sure, none of the blogs individually, or through indyblogs, gets much traffic. But they do act as a base of organizing something. There are people who read indyblogs who would never read any of the individual blogs. But, by providing listings of the pages, and back linking, we have a way of building up mutual traffic and google juice. We are creating a space which could become an echo chamber. We already have that effect within indymedia around the world, covering events in much more depth than anybody else. Adding blogs to that mix will help increase the quality of the content, our coordination, and our visibility to the outside world.

All this makes me want to put some more effort in to reviving the Anarchoblogs concept. My two doubts are this, do we call it anarchoblogs, or perhaps following the naming convention of using the 'planet-planet' software "Planet Anarchy". Another issue is, should it be 'anarchist' or the broader 'radical' blogs. The software is easy to setup, maybe i'll do both.