Blogosphere Battle Royal

Man-oh-man, has it been a whirlwind week in the Virginia blogosphere.

---> Nate de la Piedra and Greg at Daily Whackjob got into it over Nate's view of apparent racist comments (Greg jokingly calls me a beaner, Nate didn't like that, even though I have no problem with it because I know Greg's intentions when he says it). This, in return, ended up with Greg questioning the validity of de la Piedra's "New Generation Democrats" PAC. Then, NLS got into the fray, reporting Greg's findings. Things eventually settled down when Greg allowed Nate to clear things up on Daily Whackjob. However, I still wish Nate

---> Raising Kaine and NLS have taken issue with BlogNetNews's ranking system, stating that it is completely unfair. Ben over at NLS also didn't like BNN's using the first paragraph or so of his blog's articles in the BNN feed...even though Dave Mastio (who runs BNN Virginia) states that this is well within copyright laws to quote something that is public.

This, as well as some other issues NLS has with Dave Mastio, has caused NLS to remove his RSS feed completely in protest. Even though in the latest rankings, Raising Kaine was number 1, and NLS was number 4. This has led to a few other Liberal blogs to leave BNN (VBDems, GOTV, others). While I respect their decision, a lot of the cries of "unfair" have come because of the rise of the CASTLE bloggers...many of which happen to be part of the much larger (and and much more influential) ODBA...this is a fact that many have failed to notice. However, it should be noted that the CASTLE blogs do tend to link to each other and contribute to each other's "influence index" on BNN.

Now that NLS and RK have decided to pick up their ball and go home because the right-wing blogs are growing in popularity, now the lefties and the CASTLE blogs are going at each other a bit. Personally, I agree with the anonymous post at NLS that stated that NLS is "cutting off the nose to spite the face".

---> A smaller subsection of the CASTLE blogs, "Bloggers4Sayre", now have a bit of a problem with The New Dominion, an online publication with some facets of a blog, but more of a news/op-ed site. Now, I get to be privy to this little back-and-forth, as this whole "Now At The Podium" blog formed out of my weekly "Now At The Podium" columns over at The New Dominion, so I have some interest in this little spat.

Bloggers4Sayre have been pro-active in attempting to get Scott Sayre nominated for the 24th Senate District over incumbent Emmett Hanger. They've raised some excellent points about Hanger getting a lot of outside-the-district contributions, and that Hanger has made some questionable statements about the grassroots and the Sayre supports. Chris Graham at The New Dominion has brought up that half of the Bloggers4Sayre do not live within the district either. Chris Green (Spank That Donkey) went on The New Dominion's podcast, and from that podcast grew an article where Graham questioned the "non-nastiness" of some of the photoshopped images that have become popular amongst the Bloggers4Sayre.

So now, it seems that there will be a few interesting commentaries on both sides that should follow. Probably nothing of a vicious nature, but some entertainment and hopefully some informative blogging should be in the works...as well as a few little verbal jabs, just for some spice.

Nonetheless, it seems like the cauldron that is the Virginia Blogosphere has begun to really bubble and froth with these types of incidents. While this is typical "Nature of the Blog", it's interesting, and slightly amusing, that all of this came about within the same 5-day timeframe.