Maryland Blog Shout

SoapBlox is a community of progressive blogs including many state-based ones – e.g. New York’s is The Albany Project. However, Maryland isn’t one of the states included, and now that Bruce is looking to expand to a diary-based system, he’s looking for someone to run a Maryland chapter of Daily Kos.

This puts me in an peculiar spot. I would like to see a Maryland Scoop-based site develop for the purpose of liberal community building. I would like to participate in such a blog as a regular commentator, cross-posting my material there as appropriate. On the other hand, if such a progressive Scoop-site blog is not going to be formed, I would like to make Crablaw Maryland Weekly into a Scoop site to allow commentators – predominantly left-libertarian but NOT exclusively so – to post diaries routinely and to allow a formal comment ranking, etc.

What I don’t want to do is to restructure my site to Scoop at considerable effort only to wind up competing with a Maryland Scoop site run as a progressive community center. I also don’t want to shoehorn Crablaw into being that progressive community center. I respect the progressive firebrands at MyDD, but stand to their ideological right on many money issues to some extent. Essentially, I wish not to attempt to be a Maryland-based, Scoop-platform MyDD “mentee” site nor to compete with such a Maryland site.

Although the system he’s mentioning is Scoop, people without the technical knowledge necessary to operate it can use Soapblox or, if they don’t mind unreliable databases, the even simpler Drupal, which powers UTI. I was going to use Soapblox for this site back when I toyed with the idea of having my own web address; I might even switch to it if my traffic gets high enough, or if my book gets published.