Daily Kos

Daily Kos ( in an American accent) is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and liberals/progressives. Run by Markos Moulitsas Z?niga, a young United States Army veteran, it has daily traffic of 450,000 or more, and often reaches over 2.5 million unique visits in one week. It is arguably the most influential liberal weblog in the United States.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Features

The main difference between Daily Kos and other liberal political blogs, such as Atrios, MyDD or Talking Points Memo, is the sheer volume of content on the site. Daily Kos is not a standard blog, but an interactive site powered by the collaborative media application Scoop, by which user comments are privileged similarly to blog entries. Thus, while Moulitsas and several others post entries directly to the front page, the site also features "diaries," user entries that flow into the site at a speed of up to several per minute. These are identical in format to the main posts, and can advance to "recommended diary" status by user vote, or can be promoted to the front page by Moulitsas or any of the other users with front page privileges.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Daily Kos also contains permanent articles, glossaries, and other content. In April 2004, it started dKosopedia, a collaborative information clearinghouse available for open editing as a wiki, with its contents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is sustained by advertising, mostly for political candidates and books.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Daily Kos is the largest Scoop site, having surpassed Kuro5hin. The creator of Scoop, Rusty Foster, is a technology consultant for Moulitsas's company, Armstrong Z?niga.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Campaign fundraising

During the 2004 U.S. Election, Daily Kos readers gave approximately $500,000 in user donations to fifteen Democratic candidates denoted as most needing of funds. The candidates were Tony Miller, Ben Konop, Dan Mongiardo, Richard Romero, Samara Barend, Jeff Seemann, Nancy Farmer, Ginny Schrader, Jan Schneider, Lois Murphy, Jim Newberry, Brad Carson, Tony Knowles, Stan Matsunaka and Richard Morrison. All of these candidates lost. However, Moulitsas had stated that he was deliberately selecting candidates who were not receiving significant financial support from other sources; candidates who were expected to win — or even be competitive — were, by and large, already being funded by the DNC, DCCC, and other national and regional organizations. Thus, the selection of candidates reflected his belief that every seat should be contested, even the ones that were not expected to be competitive.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He also argued that the campaign was successful in that it forced several Republican incumbents to spend time and money defending "safe" seats that they had never had to defend before. For example, between Tom DeLay in Texas and Marilyn Musgrave in Colorado, Moulitsas calculates that the seed money provided by the blog's fundraising tied up well over ten times as much GOP money in return, and kept two of the GOP's most prolific fundraisers back home campaigning in their own districts for several weeks each, rather than roaming the country raising money for other candidates, as they had in past elections. At least two of his candidates came exceptionally close to winning what would have been significant upsets.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Convention

Moulitsas attended the California State Democratic convention in Sacramento early in 2004. According to Instapundit, he may have been the first blogger to be officially accredited at a political convention.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

American: :This page disambiguates the many uses of American. For an article about those various uses, please see Use of the word American....

Political: REDIRECT Politics...

Weblog: REDIRECT BlogweBlog.com...

Daily Kos related Images and Photos (experimental)

Daily Bread	Daily Bread	The Daily Coyote Book (Hardcover)	Le Quotidien (Daily Life)
Daily Life For African Slaves	Daily Verse 2012 Wall Calendar	Daily Verse 2011 Wall Calendar	Daily Bitch 2011 Desk Calendar
Daily Bitch 2012 Desk Calendar	Daily Drama 2012 Pocket Planner	Daily Doodle 2012 Desk Calendar	Red Daily 2012 Planner