February 5th, 2006
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This may or may not be part of the “secret sauce” in Gabe’s memeorandum.com, but I think Stowe Boyd is onto something. In a post about what makes blogs work — i.e., what makes them vibrant and helps them grow, as opposed to stagnating or becoming echo chambers — he says that he thinks it has something to do with the ratio of posts to comments and trackbacks.
mathew ingram
No question, the comments are often more interesting than the posts. Blogging is uniquely conversational and where a post gains comments the conversation moves forward.
The limiting case, however, is somewhere like the Daily Kos where - even if the cooments were coherent - 400 at a time is simply too many to read. A post to comment ratio of between 3:1 and 30:1 seems to me about right.
Written by jay on February 5th, 2006 with 1 comment.
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On the child-care issue of the last campaign, which may be a defining one of the new government too, Harper has effectively lifted some of the most hallowed tenets of Trudeau Liberalism — individualism and choice — and claimed them as his own.
Harper sold his $1,200-a-year plan to parents as a citizen-empowering measure: Moms and dads would be free to choose whether they wanted to use the money to send their children to daycare or stay at home to raise them. Liberals, meanwhile, got pushed toward defending the institutional model of daycare, far off on the left, government-knows-best side of the spectrum.
susan delacourt, the star via Greg Staples
The defining minute, the minute where the air went out of the Liberals tires was when they tried to push back with the “beer and popcorn” line. There are a lot of stay at home parents in Canada and they were not impressed with the nanny state approach to their children.
If the Tories follow through with more programs to give individuals choice rather than governmentally determined decisions, the CPC will be unstoppable next time out. Which some of the more politically astute Liberals recognized and acted upon by sitting out the leadership campaign.
Written by jay on February 5th, 2006 with 5 comments.
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There are very few writers or thinkers who can be said to have entirely changed the way a culture thinks of itself: for better or worse, Betty Friedan was one of them.
Her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. made it possible for women to move beyond the 50’s housewife model. There will be a fair bit of retrospective whinging as to whether the choices women have made have been all that brilliant; but Friedan’s contribution was to articulate the need for such a choice.
I have no time at all for her politics yet I have no choice but to recognize her arrival at the very instant where wealth, technology and cultural change allowed women to explore other options for their lives.
Her work was essential to the creation of the dilemmas which face Western societies. For the last forty years it has been central to our own debate about who we are.
Written by jay on February 5th, 2006 with no comments.
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