State Political Blogs

David All at Tech Republican takes a look at The New Guards: The Players, identifying ten conservative or libertarian groups that might make good contributions to the online space in the months and years to come.

David’s piece is a response to Jon Henke’s New Guards. Henke says the three components of being effective in the online space are messaging, money and mobilization.

The Sam Adams Alliance hosted Denver Samsphere over the weekend, an event to promote and build the Colorado center-right blogosphere.

The Tennessee ConserVOLiance is settling into a strong rhythm, with 20 participating bloggers.

Conservativa in Virginia is a great example of local conservative blog aggregating.

The South Dakota blogosphere made national headlines (at least in the blogosphere) back in 2004 amidst allegations of astroturf blogging in the Thune-Daschle U.S. Senate race.

Once the spotlight passed on, South Dakota’s bloggers continued on. Some of my favorites:

On March 14-16, the New Organizing Institute hosted 40 lefty bloggers at a “Blogger Summit” in Washington, D.C. As it says, “All expenses will be paid for during the Summit - including , travel, meals and accommodations.” Most of the invitation-only bloggers focus in their states on state-level political blogging.

The co-sponsors of the “Summit” were:

These sponsoring groups are known to have the same donors, the group known as Billionaires for Big Government.

Check out the list of participating bloggers.

Now, here’s the interesting thing. I clicked through to a few of the participating bloggers, Left in the West and Oliver Willis. What I found were two bloggers who blog and blog and blog and blog…but (unless I missed it) didnt say one word about the conference, or their participation in it.

How odd. What’s up with that? Is it that whole “I don’t want people to know I’m part of the VLWC thing”?

In the last month, some new resources have come online to help state-level libertarian and conservative bloggers. The most important one is Righty Blogs, which is sponsored by Redstate.

The hardworking libertarians and conservatives who cover state and local politics have long needed a blog aggregator like this, and now we have it! If you’re not signed up yet, go over there right now and sign up.

Another resource in development for local bloggers is Red State Leader.

Apart from this one, the two I’m most familiar with that serve as resources to the libertarian/conservative state-level blog communities are Ft. Hard Knox and Conservablogs.

We’re planning to write about meta-questions on the state-level political blogging scene.

By that, we mean we’ll be talking about the balance of right versus left blogging in the individual states, and the strategies the hard-left blogging scene is using at the level of state political blogs, and other fun subjects.

State Political Blogs has been a gleam in our eyes since the beginning of 2007. We plan to use this blog to cover the state political blogging scene. There’s lots to say about it, but it tends to fly under the radar.