Objective technology wins over the suppositions. That said, I’ve been here a little over 2 yrs. My recos go to diarists because I like their writing and their ideas, AND let me point out something some people want to ignore: I like participation and support of others in the community. Paying attention to others is critical to becoming a member of a community.

I read as many of the diaries at RS as possible, comment and reco to encourage. As people become established in the community they will have folks that look for them and enjoy reading their works, whether diaries or comments. We have some folks who only comment here at RS, and I always click on their comment to see what they’ve said. LisaDe in another post said this:

I believe that the people who are always on the recco list are there for one reason only, They are good. Their names are known because they write very well and consistently and they are the ones that people look for.

Cabal? No. Caring about others? Yes.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here (and my profile has forgotten as well) but I’m not a n00b. Over these many, many months, I’ve developed some friendships here. There are people here that I’ve interacted with often enough that I think of them as friends.

When we started the RS gathering, I thought the idea was to deepen those friendships and strengthen our interactions. As time has passed, I don’t think there’s any question that it has done so. But there are people that I’ve never met, tweeted, friended, or emailed that fit that criteria as well.

For example, I remember when Darin (Hello, ConservativeD!!) had his baby. Or when Nick Danger had his heart attack, or FrauBudgie ended up in ICU with her hubby giving us updates, or when c17wife’s hubby got sent overseas. And I’ve not seen JustMe in forever and a day. I’ve never had the opportunity to contact them outside RS, but I will if I get the chance, and meanwhile, if I ever see their name anywhere (in recent comments, diaries, where ever) I automatically click to see what’s going on.

I feel like I KNOW them. So naturally, if one of them writes a diary or makes a comment, there’s a lot higher likelihood that it will elicit a response from me.

Others are more recent acquaintances, but are people that I’m sure will hit that category. I love Vassar’s dry wit and his perspective from many more years than I’ve accumulated. I have enjoyed conservativecurmudgeon’s curmudgeonly postings, and orlibertygal is a fellow homeschooler, so I’ll be watching for her postings.

There is nothing cynical about this behavior. I have very little time (unfortunately I’m borrowing time from getting ready right now and better get a move on) to spend on RS, and I intend to maximize that time by first clicking on things that interest me. Then, when time permits, I’ll hit something new or interesting (where I start in the recent posts page, looking for something that is generating some interest/comments – unless a diary gets over 100 comments, then I’ll assume it’s SARAH PALIN and stay the [redacted] away. That’s making me nutso.)

Well, anyway. Tra la. Gotta go.

p.s Email me if you want to take me up on my money-making venture discussed yesterday, in which case, tweet me please!!

Proper grammar saves lives.

Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.

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Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

Flattery will get you nowhere, street…

Oh, yeah! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!!!111!!!11!

$10 to my Paypal account please. Thank you.

as another long term friend, I’d be happy to recommend your diary, but I’m going to need cash up front, as I understand you to be of the law profession (NTTAWWT IYKWIMAITYD).

Proper grammar saves lives.

Let’s eat Grandma.
Let’s eat, Grandma.

---

Activists Taking Action: Unified Patriots

It is a cabal of people trying to game the system and get certain people and certain works atop the diary list.

You know how I know this? BECAUSE I KNOW FOR A FACT!!!!!!

It is true, true, true, true, and NO amount of logic, no amount of sworn depositions from honorable men and women can dissuade me from what I know to be true. All of my friends and colleagues agree with me too, and clearly we are smarter than you (and those ‘cabal’ people).

The evidence I bring is indisputable and overwhelming. To wit:

• There are no people who write better diaries, who work harder at shaping and sharpening their argument, who present interesting and cogent work. There are no people who are more witty and engaging than others, none who do more to reach out and connect with new people (except for the Cabal of course – there are only favored and unfavored writers
• Following like night follows day, when looking down the list of Recent Diaries, there is no useful information gained by looking at the names of the authors, because all the writing is the same.
• There are no diaries that are better than any other diaries – only favored and unfavored ones.
• There are no topics more interesting than others – only the author’s name matters.
• There are no commenters who have developed relationships with other commenters — other than the Cabal of course.
• This one is really important. If a handful of commenters communicate with each other, offline, and one of them emails to the others that hey, here’s two or three good diaries, posted this morning — well, this is evil and clearly at cross-purposes with promoting quality work at RedState.
• It is perfectly obvious that Cabal people hold all the other 149,980 daily readers at RedState under some kind of evil spell that keeps them from recommending much of any work other than that approved by the Cabal. My evidence is that a large percentage, more than 50% in fact, of recommends given to approved Cabal writers are given by non-Cabal members.
• The people who are protesting my claims WHICH I KNOW FOR A FACT TO BE TRUE and denying that there is an organized effort to be true – these people are lying. No matter what their contributions, (and several of them produce more and noticeably better work than an good number of my colleagues), no matter how they’ve given on-the-ground effort in actually working to elect people (again, many of them making a good bit more of a difference than my colleagues, regardless of earned reputations for honor, these people are still lying.

All that, and plus your mother dresses you funny.

Won’t be the last. At the very least, the Recco list needs a regularly cleaning. Remove everything from the Recco list and start it over 2 or 3 times a year and much of this problem will be dealt with.

It’s a cost that acrrues to the people who participate in it most: the need to keep the pipeline full of new media commentary.

I work with some people who weigh the advantages and disadvantages of social media versus other media avenues for advertising and in my estimates so far, social media has the highest indirect cost.

You get it started, it has to be constantly fed. New updates, new material, new announcements about what’s going on, constant streams about what is happening next – or people lose interest quickly.

It’s an interesting way to connect with a large number of people at once but the cost of maintaining the connections is suprirsingly high, and it becomes more acute the smaller the organization is.

In fact I’ve been seeing a negative return in social media in terms of revenue: people might befriend you or subscribe to your “channel” or follow your Tweets but very, very rarely do they follow through with real dollars to support your organization/cause. They read your stuff, which you provide to keep them reading, and they are easily bored. More importantly, they defer responsibility: “If this person has 12,000 friends, someone else will donate and I don’t have to.”

Social media is mostly useful to the social media companies, which have vastly inflated market values once again based on a bubble of paper wealth. We’ve seen this before. It happened in the 1990s.

The entire value of Facebook is the data it collects about everyone on it about all of the mundane details of their lives. It’s the polar opposite of a blog, where everyone is a little reticent to share their details and seek anonymity. On Facebook, you get a few friends together and not only do people share their personal details, they share them in super-fine grained, geographically specific, totally identifiable detail.

Needless to say, the data-mining opportunities there are the best in the world. Want to know what people are eating for dinner in Northern New Jersey? Just sample 10,000 Facebook accounts, you’ll find out not only what people are eating, but whether they’re going there with their spouse, their sister, their old friends from high school, or their mistress.

On Facebook, people talk about almost every single decision they make in life, from leaving their spouses to what their kids are having for dinner to whether they’ve wiped themselves in the past three hours. It’s boring fare to anyone reading it but it is COMPLELTELY specific to the individual and UNSOLICITED and in their own words. In other words, it’s the realest of the realtime data you can get on human beings in this society – because it is provided by THEM.

It’s the greatest advertising data gold mine ever discovered.

When you log into Facebook, you’re feeding the Cube.