Open letter to the BooMan Community:

All –  I’m writing to apologize for the ad I ran on BooMan with the photo of Gannon/Guckert and to provide some context for it.

First, let me apologize to those upset by it.

Now, let me give some context.

As some of you know, I’m a longtime dKos reader.  I’ve been commenting on and reading Kos since back in the movable type days before he moved over to Scoop.  It was exciting to me to see this community bloom out of that one.  Indeed, one of things that keeps me coming to blogs in general is the sense of community cultivated in places like dKos, BooMan, Atrios, and MyDD.

Because of that sense of community, I created BloggersMarket.com – its kind of a “farmers market” for bloggers.  The site is designed to compliment the community aspect of blogging and be a place to interact in ways we can’t (and probably shouldn’t in some instances on our favorite blogs).

For example, let’s say a DailyKos or BooMan reader has a laptop for sale. And, another Kos or BooMan reader needs a laptop. They both are coming to Kos and/or BooMan, so they likely have similar interests, and now they have another – one has a laptop and the other needs one.  But, it would be inappropriate to start populating the Kos and BooMan comments with “laptop for sale” posts.

On BloggersMarket.com we can interact as Kos and BooMan readers to sell and buy the laptop.  The BooMan reader with the laptop can post an ad for the laptop (for free) and when they do, list BooMan as their favorite blog (I also recommend registering and using your same screename). Then, fellow BooMan readers can find them by searching for listings posted by other BooMan readers.  

The idea being we may prefer to interact with folks from our favorite blogs because of our community connection.

I ran the Gannon photo touting the Media Matters job for a couple of reasons.

  1. to get your attention
  2. to help out Media Matters. Its a great group and could use some of the talented folks that come to BooMan.
  3. to remind us that Media does indeed matter (I think we all know the details of the Gannon affair).

I’m sorry some folks took it offensively or thought it was a Media Matters ad (but, the ad did say right in the text that it was an ad for bloggersmarket).  I’m changing the ad to something I hope is not offensive and hope gets us all interacting in many ways beyond our already great interaction here on BooMan and Kos.

Best,
Jeff Davidson
(jdavidson2 on Kos).