Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monday, October 12, 2009

Nepotism Watch

By Dave Anderson:

The Yorkshire Ranter is engaged in building a platform to track media and political nepotism:

we need a Web site to monitor nepotism, and
backscratching influence-peddling more generally. WhoseKidAreYou!
There's been quite a lot of work on designing machine-readable ways of
expressing relationships between people, but to start with, I reckon we
need a decent wiki server or else perhaps a Django install, and the
British journalists section of Wikipedia as a start. We can crowdsource
the rest; we've got bitterness and resentment on our side, plus a
powerful kicker of personal loathing!

We'll need to hold basic
biographical data, plus job and publication history, a link to
corresponding Wikipedia data, and of course, the crucial affiliations.
Not just WhoseKidAreYou, but also WhoseThinktankDoYou"Work"For. Once
we've got a reasonable amount of data, we can think about social-graph
visualisations and other fancy twirls; we could also do a browser
extension that picks out bylines, searches the DB in background, and
shows a notification. "Did you know this was written by Christopher
Hitchens' illegitimate son, working for a thinktank founded by Douglas
Murray?"

For our UK readers, please participate in this worthwhile project --- for our US readers --- how do we replicate?



Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)