The Daily Kos - Assignment 3

Note to self: always write in Microsoft Word. That way, you will never lose a post ever again due to whatever post devouring demon lurks within Blogger. Curse you, you rage inducing monster. Anyways…

The Daily Kos is an easy to read blog whose numerous authors keep their postings short and sweet, just the way internet consumers love it.

Length of Text: Most postings are kept very short, typically around three to five paragraphs of no more than five sentences each. Few rarely stretch on for more than a single page screen.

Scanability: The Daily Kos takes a hit in scanability. Bullet points are reserved mainly for the Diary Rescue summaries and for extended blog postings that stretch on for multiple page screens. To really understand each post requires the reader to sift through the entire post because of often-weak headlines that don’t describe the gist of a post.

Chunking: This is where the Daily Kos excels. Although most posts are brief, featured writers tend to write summary paragraphs punctuated by hyperlinks woven into the sentences. They do a good job of keeping the in-depth and background information within the hyperlinks to keep their posts clutter free and concise. Diary writers, on the other hand, tend to write very long, very intricate and in-depth articles and tend to place more quotes from other news stories as opposed to hyperlinking them.

Headlines: The Daily Kos breaks the plain writing rule time and time again. Many authors try too hard to make their headlines cute and clever. Sometimes the sarcasm and mockery can be thick enough to cut with a knife without even touching the article yet.

Copy Editing: I haven’t seen any grammatical or spelling errors yet. There are a lot of places where language could be tightened, but most of the postings are conversational in nature. Where I’d really have to knock it is in the use of community established jargon and slang and in how the way most posts are written in a conversational manner that gives way into idioms and manners of speech that can trip up an unaccustomed reader.

Use of Inverted Pyramid: Most of the posts are too short to make use of the inverted pyramid. But for the longer analytical posts, I’d have to say many authors don’t make use of the inverted pyramid. I feel I have to read through an entire post to understand the subject.

Page Titles: There are none, unless you permalink a post which then turn the post’s headline into a page title. The only way you can find your way through the website is to pay attention to the date stamp on each post or by looking at the URL to find out how many pages you are away from the main page.

Legibility: Overall, the blog is easy on the eyes to read thanks to a clean font and concise writing. Simplicity contributes a lot to overall legibility.

The top news item is a feature I like a lot from the Daily Kos which is the Diary Rescue. Diaries are kept by regular non-featured bloggers on the Daily Kos. Those diaries which are noted throughout the day to have exceptionally strong writing, unique angles and an interesting perspective are listed on the Diary Rescue. It serves as a highlight to the rest of the Daily Kos community as to what the best postings of the day were. The Diary Rescue is easily scannable due to each diary listed in its separate bullet point along with a summary sentence.