Welcome to today’s edition of Watercooler.  I’m calling it Last Week, RedState and, yeah, I know that someone has named a weekend show something like that but, hey, if imitation is the best form of flattery, John Oliver should be flattered!

This Saturday’s, and all future, editions of Last Week, RedState will be about the activities over the last week here at RedState.  As this is the first, Last Week, RedState entry and this WC is different than most, I’ve taken the liberty to create a User’s Guide of sorts.  The format specified below will be followed next week.

Since many members of the RS community have lives outside of the RedState and, given the increase in front page articles, sometimes it seems like if you blink or, for some of us, get up three hours later on the Left Coast that we’ve missed half the fun and our voices are, occasionally, lost in the forward progress of the discussion thread or site.

Occasionally, on another diary, comments run close to the hijacking of a thread, here, those rules don’t apply.  You’re free to note a post and an interesting aside without fear of running afoul of the posting rules.  As a side note, what ever happened to the posting rules?

So, on Saturdays we all get a second chance to chat, or gossip, or complain about things that are important to you but that you might have missed or hadn’t finished discussing because, metaphorically, you’ve been on the road and away from the office.  Those that were engaged in the discussion have a second chance to raise their hands and say, hey, that was a great discussion and you ought to go take a look for yourself!

The Saturday edition of WC will be organized topically around these areas:

• A Welcome Section: Noting that not all members of the RedState community are retired or blog addicted or live on the West Coast and might have missed an interesting thread because they only pop-by once a week, the welcome is intended to set the rules;
• Hot Topics Last Week: RedState is posting so many articles that before a post and the very active comment section is exhausted, many commenters have moved onto new posts.  Last Week, RedState is a sticky-post like way to re-open the commenting thread, but, on the WC side thereby letting the part-timers jump into the fray;
• Tail Wags Dog: Sometimes the comments sections use the posts as a starting point and, because of the firestorm that erupted from a single comment, the comments become far more interesting and far longer than the original posts. By the time some of us pop-by, the commenting frenzy has died off and, unless you knew what had happened, the rich back-and-forth exchanges are lost.  Noting those events here and providing a link or summary might help us immensely;
• Recurring Topics on RedState: Over a period of one or more weeks (or even months) some topics are revisited over and over and over again, here is a place to aggregate those repeated topics and provide links to those so others can quickly find the topics and the links.  I sometimes find others and myself repeating the same arguments and/or literally copying comments from one thread over to another;
• RedState Gatekeeper: Where new members in the community are noted and welcomed and where some of the Reader’s Diaries can be mentioned and/or highlighted so that these contributors are brought to the attention of more people;
• Memorable RedState One-Liners: Every once and awhile a great one-liner is encountered, this section would be used to note one or more of the One-Liners encountered during the week, cool one-liners from other sites are allowed but, since this WC is related to RS contributors are some of the best, restricting these to the RS community is encouraged;
• Best Video or Picture Usage:  This speaks for itself but, if you’re anything like me, I want to keep track of some of the great video clips without having to remember the exact post it was found on, this tag would allow more people to see and use the post or just revel in it one more time;
• Invitation to Square Of On an Issue on the Back Page (I haven’t come up with a catchy name but, The Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Corner came to mind): This is related to the Tail Wags Dog section in that, some of these long ‘tails’ could more effectively taken out of the comments section and discussed at some depth in a Diary.  An invitation to organize a new comment thread or create one or more Reader’s Diaries around the topic of interest could then be issued.  The Saturday WC would then be used to tie the arguments from two different Reader’s Diaries together both for and against each Diary.
• RedState Tips: I think it makes some sense to provide a forum for RedState user to ask for and be given tips on things they’d like to find out for RedState related posting (maybe HTML markups that create cool block quotes; bold, underlined, or italicized text, etc.  or maybe… ways to start a YouTube clip at the time point that some only point to a time to start watching);

At it’s core, this format is a hack of the RS site design, one that allows cross-linking across content on the site over time or topics.  Since this is the first installment of the Last Week, RedState Watercooler, suggestions are welcome.

Drink up, that’s it for the Watercooler today. Remember, this thread is all about RedState contributors whether they are on the front page, the back page, or in the comments section.

Feel free to pick any of the above topics and invent a hash tag close to the topical structure to organize your comments (I’ll listen to the community and pick the best of the lot).  As always it’s an open thread