If you are interested in the center-to-left blogosphere or even if you aren’t and you live in, work in or give a damn about Maryland, please check in! Connecticut is a nice place but the whole world does not revolve around nutmeg. Whether you live in Baltimore, in “Big Mo” Montgomery County, on the Shore, in Western Maryland or any and all points in between, please feel free to check in below and (if you feel comfortable) identify your county/town where you live and work and any blogs – political or non-political – that you manage or write on that deal with Maryland or localities in Maryland as a major subject.
This entire diary is a modification of a diary I put on Daily Kos; this is my first here at the Booman Tribune and I am pretty new here. I would not normally cross-post (that’s I think sometimes frowned upon) but this is a sort of a roll call-notice diary. If I violate Booman Tribune etiquette, please someone let me know, I want to be a good citizen here.
Being egotistical, I will start with myself. I run Crablaw Maryland Weekly on Maryland law and politics and Crablaw Magazine as an RSS-linked companion site that discusses anything I happen to feel like writing about.
Maryland Weekly has been around for about two years and is on its 335th post; the Magazine is a new arrangement to help sift out non-Maryland materials so that Maryland Weekly will be more attractive to advertisers in the future. One of the things that I enjoy doing on my sites is using icons as self-descriptive links. For example, my link to Maryland traffic reports just has an icon of the I-95 road sign; others link to Baltimore’s Little Italy, Maryland political parties and others. For me, it is an entertaining exercise to get a 60-by-60 chiclet image to identify its target link.
I am a frequent contributor to Free State Politics which is managed by blogging workaholic On Background, who follows Montgomery County politics and Maryland politics generally on his own site with frequent cross-posts to FSP. FSP has about 16 contributors including nationally-known Oliver Willis on occasion. FSP is about to undergo a format-revamp; On Background and I have been exchanging ideas about formatting for his site. Other frequent contributors include (among many) The New MoCo Progressive and a new contributor Sara Matthews aka Sara Da Muse at Sara Tells, who has provided sharp reviews of a local “bluer-than-thou” primary fight and of dynamic women candidates in Maryland this election season.
The Maryland Blogger Alliance, which is actually a mostly conservative loose affiliation of bloggers, risked their billion-dollar endowment and “redstate” reputation by admitting old libertarian-liberal me, but we get along genially. There is no central site for the MBA, but probably the leading voice among the MBA is Pillage Idiot aka “Attila” checking in frequently from Rockville. While Attila is a good deal more conservative than I am, his posts are very sharp and funny, including one hilarious post on the “cleavage wars” in one Texas school district and another on a rude mockup on Lamont (whom I support, but I found it funny anyway). Another MBA blog, the Maryland Conservatarian, is run by a law school colleague of mine and has the very smart, sharp edge (though not the political orientation!) that I enjoy from many liberal commenters and diarists, but from a different side of the ideological aisle. Another well-respected conservative Maryland observer not part of the MBA is The Hedgehog Report out of Howard County, whose site provides excellent poll coverage of a great many races in an even manner, distinguishing poll data from political orientation.
Other bloggers in MD with whom I am acquainted include Ian Danger, whose progressive blog has sharpened its look and inspires me to do likewise, and Mr. X, a strong libertarian whose writings range from politics to law school to bourbon to Roman stoicism.
My own view is that Maryland blogging culture is good but underdeveloped, unlike for example Philadelphia, home to Atrios and most of MyDD.com. So I link to conservative Maryland bloggers frequently for the benefit of all, including myself. But I would LOVE to be connecting with more liberals and libertarians (the Nadine Strossen kind, not necessarily the Grover Norquist kind) here in Maryland for fun and profit. I don’t aspire to become a good national blogger, but to become an excellent one for Maryland (and, implicitly, DC, where a large part of Maryland works.)
So if you have a Maryland blog or comment frequently on one or more, or just have something interesting to say about Maryland blogging in general, have at it and thanks!
