Here’s a special treat for you long-time fans. My lovely wife Lisa will make her first appearance as guest blogger in a few minutes. There’s always room for a little mommy perspective, even on a daddy blog.

One thing that will take your blog out of my newsreader and blog roll: delete my comment on your blog. I left a perfectly civil response on a conservative Montgomery county blog a few days ago. Germane to the topic of the post, no offensive language, no ad hominem attacks. I merely posted contradictory evidence to the assertion of the post. (And I had citations.) The comment posted just fine without moderation. But today I visited again and noticed that them comment was deleted.

Listen, if you’re not prepared for a little feedback and debate, don’t solicit comments on your posts.

The blog’s been quiet for a brief spell. Here’s why:

• Two out of three of us had birthdays.
• Mother’s Day, including the completion of the annual movie project.
• Planting of the annual flowers.
• T-ball.
• Visits from three grandparents and an uncle.
• A primary election, and all of the corresponding electioneering.

All events passed successfully. I’m just a wee bit exhausted.

As for the election, David Landau was the top vote-getter in the Democratic primary for County Council. (This was expected, but it’s always good to have the confirmation.) There hasn’t been a Democrat on Delaware County’s Council for almost 30 years, so it’s essential to have a top-flight candidate like David to lead the slate. We also had two cross-filed Democratic candidates (District Judge Stephanie Klein and School Board candidate Michael Reilly) who won both the Democratic and Republican primaries. These are not just politicians, they’re our friends and neighbors, so these successes are particularly exciting. In many respects, much more exciting than victories in much larger elections.

If you haven’t visited the Delco Times web site recently, they changed the format. (The changes appear to be in the pipeline for all of the other sites in the network: AllAroundPhilly.com, DailyLocal.com, PhoenixvilleNews.com, Pottstown Mercury.com, TheReporterOnline.com, TimesHerald.com, and the Trentonian.com.)

While more readable than the archaic-looking legacy sites, the new sites are a serious buzzkill for those who linked to any past news articles. They’re all busted. As in kaput. Serious darts to you, tech boys! It’s like you hate the people who drive traffic to you. I don’t get it.

While you’re at it, test out your style sheets in browsers other than Explorer on the PC. I can vouch that your site doesn’t load properly on a Mac with Safari or Firefox.

And while I’m griping, Mr. Heron, you can’t claim to be a blogging editor unless you have a comments section and you link to other sites. Otherwise, it’s just another editorial. The medium is the message.

Anyhoo, thanks to those who wrote comments in to me to tell me about my broken links. It’s all the paper’s fault. Please redirect your complaints to:

Philip E. Heron, Editor of the Daily Times. Email him at editor@delcotimes.com, or call (610) 622-8818.

PSotD played the “Free Beer” trick last week, but with the lure of undressed (ick) Ann (ick) Coulter. The point of the exercise was not merely to lure people with a strange pruience. It was to make a point about search engines and the importance of blogrolls and linking.

I covered the topic of Google PageRank and it’s implications for political commentary and electioneering here about six weeks ago. PSotD’s post points out another potential for search engines to be gamed or bombed. I was trying to point to a more legitimate area of search optimization that every single small-time blogger should reckon with. (Actually, I’m hoping that only my friends on the progressive side of the blogosphere are paying attention.)

Blogs have themes. Over time, any good blog is going to come to own mindshare on the conversation of the topics it blogs about most.

The lefty side of the Pennsylvania blogosphere is already more developed than its right-wing counterpart. There already exists a pretty robust variety of bloggers, big and small, promoting the progressive agenda in PA, whereas the conservatives seem to be congregating in concentrated enclaves like Grassroots PA. The conservative side seems to be much more focused on the editorial page of newspapers, but that often puts them at a disadvantage with respect to developing PageRank.

For PSotD’s observations to be useful, we have to get past blogrolls. Being included on a Blogroll is helpful, but it’s far more important for bloggers to keep linking to each other’s specific posts. Not only does the attention stroke your comrades’ inherent narcissism, it also promotes their voice on the topics that matter. The difference is the keywords that people use in actual searches. People don’t search for “Daddy Democrat,” they search for news on Delaware County or Joe Sestak and find their way here.

It’s great to leave comments on posts you like. But if you have a blog or community diary, it’s far grander to extend the conversation with a post.

All for one, and one for all.

My most recent cartoon appeared on the web site of NPR’s On the Media. It was used as the graphic to accompany a story on the recent history of the political pseudo-apology, “Mistakes were made.”

The whole thing was a demonstration of the power of the creative commons and crowdsourcing. To make the cartoon, I used a $25 Mac application called Comic Life and a $50 graphics tablet. In addition to the images I make myself, I adapt source images from the public domain and other creative commons contributors on flickr. The last frame in the comic is an adaptation of another flickr user’s photograph of a polling place on election day.

On Thursday I posted the image on flickr and attached a creative commons license. On Friday, somebody from the NPR program found the image, notified me of their desire to use it, and used it on their site, with an appropriate attribution.

In 48 hours, two generations of creative adaptation took place among three parties who had no prior relationship and never anticipated collaborating.

The Internet is a lot more than just a bunch of tubes, Senator Stevens.

As already widely noted, Google has changed their PageRank algorithm to counteract the practice of coordinated link bombing. This should effectively put an end to attempts, such as those organized by MyDD’s Chris Bowers, to elevate the the ranking of news stories that cover controversies surrounding Republican opponents.

No tears shed here. Gaming search results for tiny tactical advantages in the midst of large-scale political races is not my thing.

But political candidates, campaign staff, and political bloggers alike should not lose sight of the real and ongoing battlefield of legitimate search engine optimization, especially in local and regional races. After all, a blog typically covers recurring themes and topics. In that respect, every blog is its own link bomb.
Feel free to check on some of these Google search terms, which generate a lot of traffic to this site:

FAA Delaware County or FAA Delco: New airplane flight paths out of the Philadelphia Airport are a big issue in our suburban Philly community. The changes were possibly the top issue in Novembers’s race for state representative, and the results will figure heavily in the municipal elections of 2007, and possibly even the re-election bids for legislators in 2008. This blog accounts for the two top results for the former term, and fourth the for latter. In both cases, ahead of any elected official’s site, and ahead of the (100% Republican) County government’s own site on proposed FAA flight path changes.

Bryan Lentz
Daddy Democrat ranks fifth for searches on our freshman state representative (PA-161), behind his campaign site and a site so pro-Lentz it’s called “Citizens for Lentz.” Of the fifty top-ranked Google results, all are pro-Lentz or neutral, despite the existence of an attack site generated by his opponent’s campaign that they advertised through direct mail.

Tom Gannon
Things online weren’t nearly as well-controlled for Bryan’s opponent, an entrenched 28-year legislator from the majority party. Yours truly accounts for the content at three of the top ten Google results for searches on his name. Only two of the top ten results are pro-Gannon.

Let’s face it. The big media outlets will typically control the narrative of national and statewide politics. But the field is still wide open for individual bloggers to shape the discussion of regional issues and elections. In fact, search engines probably play a proportionally larger role in influencing voters in local and down-ticket elections, where voters may know less about candidates and might use search engines to survey the available information.

The current political off-season is the time to lay claim to as many of the terms and future traffic as we can, making it harder for opponents to gain traction later.

Simple things you can do right now…

• Make sure your site has links to the official sites for newly elected Democratic officials in your region. Make sure you’re in the loop on positive stories out of their offices.
• Start tracking and linking to negative or controversial stories about Republican officials in your area. Make sure those stories have a long shelf life.
• Maintain or extend your contacts with other area bloggers.
• Create categories or tags for candidates and issues you follow, positive or negative. Make sure you use names and key words in post titles.
• Make use of appropriate cross-linking opportunities. Do you have relevant items in community diaries, flickr, or YouTube? Link them to your blog entries and vice versa.