What the hell kind of site is this?

For starters, it's crap. This site is total crap, so don't expect much because I'm an idiot. This site is my sketch book, my side project and my feeble attempt to connect with other talentless idiots.

Here, I post my pitiful political cartoons, funny videos made by people far more talented than I am, weird news stories, boring rants about Democrats and the Republican Party, weak observations about freedom of religion and other concepts I only barely understand, and lots of other crap. I guess the key point to take away from this is that most of what you'll find here is total crap.

-Blue Steel

Q&A Interview: Justin Gardner of Donklephant.com

Donklephant.com is a site I feel a particular kinship toward. Editor Justin Gardner is a man after my own heart, dedicated to respectful, civil, reasonable debate -- no partisan cock fights here -- with just a touch of the outlandish thrown in for good measure.

I recently had the privilege of bending Justin's ear for a short time. Justin discusses how Donklephant.com got its start, how he keeps the site's many contributors on task, top challenges, and where Donklephant.com is headed in the future.

1. Take us back to the dawn of Donklephant. Where did the idea for the site come from, and how did it get started?

First off, I'm a moderate liberal. So back before the site started, I was a pretty avid reader of left wing blogs. But as time went on, it was getting increasingly harder to read them on a day in and day out basis. I felt there was little room for disagreement, and it just seemed to be getting more and more strident as the months went on.

So around June 2005 I saw an advertisement from Duncan Riley (now a writer for TechCrunch) announcing the formation of a new blog network, The Weblog Empire. Back then he ran the Blog Herald, which was one of the top sites about blogging in the world. So I decided to pitch him the idea of a site where the entire political spectrum was represented and open, honest debate was encouraged. He liked it and we began blogging in July 2005.

2. The site has a growing network of contributors and authors. How do you keep everyone working on the same page, so to speak?

Once I invite people to blog at Donklephant, the page is literally theirs. I don't mandate any set schedule or policy for doing original posts. I just ask the contributors to keep their language clean and their arguments sharp. It's worked out so far, as we've had 3,163 posts and 17,142 comments, contained within 63 categories in less than two years.

As for keeping everybody on the same page, it's not like a traditional group blog. It's more like a collection of diverse voices, where some blog more frequently than others, but most everybody has access to blog when they want to. I think it keeps the site fresh and makes for surprises if people want to come back and do a post if they haven't done one in a while.

3. Could you run us through a typical day in the life of Donklephant's editor?

I have a full time job, so a lot of my blogging is done in the morning or during breaks during my workday. And we're still a smaller site in the grand scheme of things, so my day usually just entails checking a bunch of news sites in the morning and finding interesting information I think our readers would enjoy. I also sometimes submit stories to some social news sites in hopes that people would find it interesting and vote it up the ladder. It helps with traffic and attracts new readers.

4. What is your favorite thing about being involved with the site? Least favorite thing?

My favorite thing is just sharing information and opinions, and the ability to hear other people's. So I just love blogging itself, the way it connects people and ideas. My least favorite things are spam and hackers. I think I have the spam thing almost solved, but hackers will always be a consistent worry. They're just the realities of doing business I suppose.

5. Where do you hope to take Donklephant in the future, and what can your fans expect from Donklephant 2.0?

I've given this some thought recently, and I really like the way that some of the bigger blogs have given users the ability to create their own diaries within their domains. But that seems like it would take a lot of infrastructure and I'm not sure we're at that point yet.

In the end, I've found that Donklephant 1.0 is growing at a very nice, steady clip and maybe in a couple years when I have the traffic to justify it, I'll consider what a 2.0 will look like. For now, though, I'm pretty happy with the progress.

TAGS: Interview, Blogging, Donklephant, Reasonable, Politics, Political, Blog, Moderate, Republicans, Democrats, Conservative, Liberal, News, Forum

June 23, 2007

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