I thought we might take some time to discuss exactly what a blog is. If we do not have an adequate understanding of what a main post is, we cannot discuss what a comment is. And if we cannot discuss what a comment is, I will have nothing to talk about here. An awful lot of people who comment on my posts have relayed to me their belief that I never have anything to talk about.  I simply make a note of it; record the date and time of the comment; include the TPMC name and copy the comment itself.

Then I send the information to the FBI agent I have been working with over the last year and he sends me beer and cigarette money.

From an historical viewpoint, the comment arose from the old letters to the editor section of the local and national newspapers. I grew up in the Minneapolis area and we had the Minneapolis Tribune. Minneapolis was a city of 350,000 in those days with a market of one million readers. One would wake up in the morning and open the paper to the editorial section with a cup of java and a smoke.  I know smoking is taboo in this day and age, but at age 13 it was the proper thing for me to do.

In 1963 there might be an editorial from the Evans-Novak team appearing in that paper.  This team would publish every day somewhere, but every one of their editorials contained the same message; over and over and over again. Every one of these essays would inform the reader that:

1.  The commies are attempting to take over the world and Democrats were not doing anything about it and the end of the world was near.

2.  The Democrats were over taxing everyone and when you tax too much, the worker does not wish to work anymore because it is not worth it.  And further, the investor (read here filthy rich) would not longer feel that it was worthwhile to hire people anymore and that is why there was the unheard of unemployment rate of over 3%.

3.  The people in the Southern States were happy and doing just fine and the communists from the Northern States were going to those happy Southern Places and spreading discontent and attempting to foment revolution among all those happy Negroes living down there.

4.  Communists were attempting to institute  a new minimum wage in excess of $1.00/hour which would lead to riots in the streets. And the small business owner would no longer hire any new workers because they could not make any money paying those kinds of wages.

5.  Unions, which then represented about 38% of the work force, were run by communists and the mob and they would be the ruin of America and freedom around the world and the commies would take over the world.

Now, not all the Evans/Novak editorials were the same, but basically they all contained at least one of these five different contentions.

There was a letter to the editors section in every newspaper. Now, you can imagine, if 10,000 people would write a comment to the Minneapolis Tribune objecting to the part of the editorial that called Hubert Humphrey a communist sympathizer-which is what would happen when such a contention was put into print-two or three would be published.  That was freedom of the press in 1963.

Now the editorial is really the blog. I don't care if it's the WSJ or the Huffington Post or TPM.
And the blog has a comment section. Only a WSJ editorial might gather 500 comments and so would a blog from Madam Huff.   These should all be categorized as Tier-One blogs.

Human nature as it were, has not changed in 45 years or so. Out of ten thousand letters to the editor responding to the contention that Humphrey was a communist sympathizer., fully three thousand of these letters would say something like:

Evans/Novak are fascist bastards and f....them and the horse they rode in on, and I am going to track them down and .....furthermore, in order to clarify my position on this matter may I say &^##%$((*&__)^*(&)%%$#^%#*)&()^__(_()&&)(^*%&#$#@$@$**^^)()(*))_+))*()( and your mother.

Letters containing messages such as these rarely were published.  Once in awhile the head of the letters to the editor section would be drunk on the job, and a contentious letter published. To be sure several people were fired the next day from the newspaper.

Now, the netwebblogosphere changed the medium. It did not alter the human spirit. Therefore the paper/blog had to institute rules that became more and more specific over time.

In some of these blogs, you are limited to 300 words, or 500 words or 1000 words. And they ban certain words used by the late George Carlin. Each blog has its own rules but the rules we have been discussing in this series are pretty applicable to most blog sites.  I mean basically, the monied class that runs these sites saw immediately that THE PEASANTS WERE REVOLTING.

Now we come to a discussion of the Tier Two blogosphere. That is us. Although I have seen TheraP, Jason and recently Belle (wwStaebler) receive 300 comments on one blog, that is not the rule here. Personally if I receive 20 comments and 10 rec's, I have had a fine day. And that usually means that five or ten people have entered into the discussion. These rules that I am discussing in this series really do not apply here. That is why it becomes so funny when you begin parsing the rules in the context of TPMCafe. WE ARE THE PEASANTS. And we really do not feel that we are revolting. In truth some of us are. But not the majority, for sure. Hahahahaha. And further, these rules have to do with commenting to a blog and not blogging itself.

There are PHD's and MD;s and people with degrees that cover a multitude of subjects. Self- schooled people who can quote from hundreds of sources at any moment; people who have been published.

With that its time for Oddball. No, but it is time to briefly review:


                             THE NETWEBBLOGOSPHERE CANON OF ETHICS:


6. Cite your sources with links or inline quoting. Copying and pasting large blocks of text from other sites is strictly off limits, even with links or identification of the source. It is best to summarize why you think the item is significant, provide a few quotes from it and ALWAYS include the link. Never paste quotes from another site without the link. Use url shortening tools such as tinyurl.com for lengthy addresses. Multiple links (3 or more) in a single comment are held for review by our spam filter -- two per comment only!    


And sometimes somebody can post an essay of three paragraphs and get 16 back from Q and you never know if it is going to be the funniest thing you ever read or a serious exercise in argument.

Citing is important to me, whether you link or not. But number 6 is an attempt to control the hundreds and sometimes thousands of people who are invited to comment to a major blog site.

We have our little club and it is associated with a serious news outlet that is quoted and cited in other blogs and newspapers as well as cable TV. How the hell can you do better than that?  

Oh and if your comment does not 'go through', make sure you did not include three or more links.        

Oh and thanks again to Craig Crawford and Trail Mix