Blogging evolves, as we know. Case in point: two instances this week of concerted blogging tactics to influence the Web. Both of these are about politics, but this post isn't making a political observation.
The Kos comment: Michael Friedman launched a quick campaign to dislodge advertisers from Kos, after that blogger's comments about the killings in Falluja. Kos removed the initial post (other bloggers archived it), wrote about it, and criticized the blog response. Instapundit responded and aggregated blog posts. Other bloggers joined the campaign. John Kerry's blog delinked Kos. Instapundit sought perspective, seeing Kos' sequence of posts as symptomatic of a larger ideological problem.
Lessons: blog ads are an approachable target for blogging campaigns, drawing on the history of a variety of divestment drives. The combination of high-profile, emotionally invested topics (the war in Iraq) with blogging prominence is one stage setting for such campaigns. Contextual research, a la Trent Lott's fall, is not required; the one post plus general reputation was enough, here. Blogging campaigns work by swarming, not command and control - i.e., no order went out from BlogCommand, but bloggers networked and piled on. The blogospheric Web is more likely to remember something than the nonbloggic Web, despite one's post hoc behavior and the Web's emphemeral tendencies. The timeframe for such campaigns can be very very fast, a few days from start to the loss of momentum. Lastly, framing becomes critical, as contextualization is essential to fitting a comment into a campaign - first, it was the frame of Kos as major liberal blogger; second, the frame of the antiwar left.
Coming up: case #2.
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