I can see it now the, 22nd century, a grad students dissertation title "An analysis of the Culture Wars in early 21st century America: Daniel W. Drezner's comment threads." Or heres a better one, "David Thompson and Oldman, the great debate"

Anyone who is considering a political career should probably stop posting to the boards here. Imagine 10-20-30 years from now, your running for President or something and some grad student digs up your comments on this blog and sells them to the press. I'm thinking more about the Selma Hayek threads more than the political ones here.

"Remember, this is for posterity...."

Regarding the quest for immortality--intellectual or artistic--Woody Allen said it all: "It's not a Keane. It's a Cugat!"

This is very cool, and congratulations to you, Dan. But how is this different from the Internet Archive, apart from being more rarefied?

That should read "Thomson", not "Thompson". Sorry DT.

haha. That's quite amusing.
sam raises a plausible concern...

MEDUSA was taken, then, I gather?

chigago-er,
Its going to happen at some point, probably sooner than most people think. A politician is going to dig up something that their opponent said on a comment post or something and quote it in an attack ad. It wont matter if the opponent was nineteen or something when it was written, it will be used.

There's one poster over at MichaelTotten.com that said he isn't going to start a blog because he might want to go into politics someday. He said he didn't want someone finding a quote of him saying something like "the Reagan Democrats wont be significant for much longer as their getting old and soon they'll be dead" or something like that. I said he should just wait until after they all die before running.

I think there should be more S. Hayek content here precisely because of those future grad students.

(Perhaps I am projecting, a little.)

Anyway, it would only take one constitutional amendment to allow Ms. Hayek herself to become President, if she should so desire.

C.

Dan;

I dunno as we should conisder things to be any different than they were prior to this (rather nice, congrats!) offer.

Consider, Google/DejaNews. That folks in that medium are being recorded on a permanant online record, doesn't seem to affect things much.

In any event, I'm not sure it should, either here OR there. It's been my experience that when one thinks he's writing for posterity, he ends up instead writing for posterior.

Sam is right. Comments posted on a board like this would most likely be researched sooner than later, specifically because a poster later went on to a career in public life.

I wonder how useful using a cybernym would be in evading such research. On the one hand use of a cybernym could create ambiguity concerning authorship, which might be particularly useful for posters of intemperate comments. On the other hand the posters most likely to find their way in later life to elective or appointive office might want to have some visible record of their past thinking, and use of a cybernym might raise questions about what they had to hide. Though it isn't that difficult to discover a poster's real identity if one really wants to.

Quick note to my yet-to-be-conceived grandchild: Granddad says hi! How's school?

Blogs like this one have become fairly important. My guess is that at least 5,000 people daily visit danieldrezner.com. These folks are likely to be better read than the rest of the citizenry. They are almost certainly the movers and shakers within their immediate social milieu. Some are famous in their own right. The financial cost of hosting a blog is relatively small. A daily newspaper with a similar numbers of readers probably needs to bring in a yearly minimum total of * $912,500 just to keep the doors open.

This is another reason why the age of innocence is rapidly ending. We have so far taken it for granted that most bloggers and posters, however brilliant or goofy that they might be, are sincere people. Now we are sometimes forced to ask: are we being Mobyied? Or, is someone like a George Soros (or a wealthy conservative) discretely spending a few dollars to influence us?

* How did I come up with that total? I figure that each newspaper cost 50 cents each X 365 days a year X 5,000 subscription total.

Since its for posterity:

Commentator Match Game

( ) DT
( ) Kelli
( ) Jesurilac
( ) Tom Holzinger
( ) Appalled Moderate
( ) Zathras
( ) Bithead
( ) Carolina
( ) Oldman
( ) Voice of the Democracies
( ) Reid

1. yes, Judge, I want to be a responsible father and husband but I have NEEDS--were I legally able to have three wives, I would be able to live within the bounds of marriage AND provide for my family.

2. You're not a Heinlein fan, are you?

3. I know more about Spanish wine than Spanish politics, and if it's all the same to the posters fighting their off-topic battles would like to put out some questions to anyone with some knowledge of political currents in that country.

4. We're not in the democracy-building or legitimacy building phases yet. We're still doing threat elimination and revolutionary overthrow.

5. It's not like homosexual behavior is limited to humans.If you saw my brother in law's Boston Terrier try to make a woman of my poor old beagle, you'd know better. I think, for some people, being homosexual is normal.

6. Baloney. This unwillingness to assimilate is entirely due to the silliness of the Democrat Party and its liberal intellectual partners in crime.

7. To me, this whole rhetoric - this willingness to oppose same-sex marriage based on untested hypotheses - is so uncoordinated and based on such frangible logic that it proves to me that the real basis of opposition to same-sex marriage is bigotry - a bigotry that the opponents don't want to acknowledge.

8. Just a parting comment. The fetish with paying down debt, what I call Parochial Checkbook Economics (PCE), is what doomed the British Empire. You have to take your eyes off the trees and focus on the forest. And, the forest is made up of GOODS and SERVICES

9. Makes one wonder who would be behind it all. Along that line, the people who won the election had so much to gain from such an attack; Might the socialists be behind this attack, I wonder?

10. The truth on this matter is somewhat in the middle. The (insert self-reference in the third person here) favors the course of action that he just recently discovered that Paul Oneill and Greenspan did, but he came to same conclusion separately.

11. The question then becomes -- what do you do with the losers? You can't just shoot them. Right? They're going to hang around, clogging up the planet. Sure, maybe they should they just crawl off and starve somewhere, but they won't. They're tenacious, they cling like barnacles to the earth.

Blogs like this one have become fairly important. My guess is that at least 5,000 people daily visit danieldrezner.com

Between 3,000 and 10,000, with around a 5500 hpd average.

“Between 3,000 and 10,000, with around a 5500 hpd average.”

I am being very cautious with my figures. The typical newspaper reader spends only around 10% of the total cost of the publication. Advertisers are the ones who really keep a paper in business. I doubt very much that one can publish a daily newspaper for anything less than $2.00 a copy. Does anyone know more about this than I do? If this is so, let’s do some additional 4th grade math:

$2.00 X 5,500 X 365= $4,015,000

well, I'm just going by what Dan's SiteMeter is saying.

Sam is right. Comments posted on a board like this would most likely be researched sooner than later, specifically because a poster later went on to a career in public life.

Heh.
Well, here ya go, for that:

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9601/df960124.jpg

Note to self: Remember to turn off the Stove

The power feels good, yes?

What do you suppose this says about unemployment? or are there too many people with too much time time on thier hands.

Guys, don't you remember this story?

Legislator May Resign over Anti-Police Comments
N.H. Lawmaker Wrote ‘Nothing Wrong’ with Cop-Killing

(Wow, I'm feeling old; I didn't realize this was 3 years ago already.)

TexasToast: Heh. ;-)

(To my posterity: I'm 7, by the way - yes, that was a particularly garbled day - and I spelled it Jesurgislac.)