May 16, 2006
Too much...
Too strange...Lorie Byrd has been kicked off of the group-blog PoliPundit because she wouldn't follow PoliPundit's Party Line on immigration.
...The fact is that I believe this is the last time I will be blogging at Polipundit.
I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: "From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com." I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: "It's over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It's time to go our own separate ways."...
Absurd. Nootzy. You can come blog at Random Jottings if you like, Lorie....
Update: Thinking a little more, I have to feel a certain sympathy for PoliPundit. A blog is sort of an extension of one's self. suppose I added co-bloggers, and they started to espouse positions I really hated. It would probably spoil all the fun of blogging for me. I don't mind vigorous debate in the comments, but in the posts themselves? Nuh uh.
It would matter if it wasn't so easy to set up another weblog and post there. It took Byrd what, all of 12 hours to be weblogging elsewhere?
I agree with the view that it's Polipundit's weblog and he can set whatever ground rules he wants, absolute despot of his domain.
Moreover, it's like employment -- the harder it is to get rid of someone, the less likely people will be to try out different combinations. Let the readers sort them out.
Reason No. 576445 why group blogging is pointless; it's like having a group diary -- you come home, expecting to be able to write about your latest crush in peace, and one of the other "diarists" has written that they think your crush is a poopyhead. In the days BB (Before Blogging), there were these things called "forums," and before that, there was Usenet, and before that in the most Ancient of Days, there were the editorial pages of the newspapers. I think that the world has quite enough resources to find differing opinions in one place; I for one go to blogs to find out what a single person thinks.
Posted by: Andrea Harris at May 16, 2006 06:03 PMMy blog is the one place where I'm the cool kid, in with the in-crowd (me) and everybody else is an awkward outsider. At least until they've hung around for awhile on the edge of the crowd (me) and been accepted...
I'm not likely to change things.
Posted by: John Weidner at May 16, 2006 08:46 PM
