Selected “final comments or suggestions:”
Maybe it’s time for a makeover of the look of the site. It’s a little campy and monochromatic.
BMG is a daily must read. The posts and comments are fascinating and extremely informative.
Way too many ads. A couple years ago they weren’t too intrusive, but since the interstitial ads popped up I now use Adblock on Firefox to block the ads on BMG and everywhere else
don’t forget the nonprofit sector (both in important topics for posting, and as an employment category…)
You do a great job, don’t change too much and forget your roots.
Keep up the great work!
Thanks for putting this site together!
Please publish at least selected aspects of survey results. We are, after all, voyeurs or we wouldn’t be reading you.
A greater awareness of gender diversity, other than simply male/female, would have been appreciated.
alas, bmg became a talking circle. i haven’t followed it for a long time. i consider myself a long-standing and dedicated liberal. but i found the inability of bmg and it’s core contributors to consider any idea outside of warhorse left/dem orthodoxy to be very stagnant and unimaginative. it’s great if toeing the party line and rallying the troops is the objective, but the way dissenting views and ideas are routinely dismissed and ridiculed make it very difficult to develop real comprehensive conversations about large nuanced issues. too bad. bmg coulda been contendah.
Keep up the great work; though I don’t always agree with most contributors, I love their intelligence and wit.
Palin 2012!
BMG is my go-to source for state-wide issues and local congressional races. No need to cover national or international issues — other people do that well. But for Mass stuff, there’s none better.
The writing by the principals is much more valuable than the writing by the activists and users and commenters.
BMG is an invaluable resource for social change activists who are working on issues that the mainstream media won’t address.
Great job!
Central Mass is not covered by any of your choices. Under $25,000 and no answer are not necessarily the same. Retired not offered as a choice. “Finland extreme socialist 1975”?? Do you expect us to look that up in Wikipedia? Deval Patrick a progressive??? Give me a break! Communist means supports dictatorship under conditions of postwar ruin and starvation? Who would admit to that? Minority groups: we’re going to lump being Black, undocumented Albanian, lesbian and Inuit together? Really, that’s all you want to know? “I read this.” Read what? And before I’d want a podcast I’d like to see a daily digest with a list of contents and live links.
Where did you get my name? I have never seen your site–maybe one of my children?
Just keep it coming!!
Keep up the good work — yours is an invaluable service to our community
Don’t be apologists for the public sector unions.
love love love belonging to BMG community
Keep it fun, timely and simple. Your archiving tools are good.
I’m from Central Mass Dammit!
I’m ready for a primary challenge to Obama! If he caves in on this horrific tax cut for the wealthy, then he’s too weak to lead, and he’s forgotten what it means to be a Democrat. We need a leader who is not BEATEN DOWN by the evil, corporate, right-wing puppet masters. We need Truman and FDR, not a weak triangulator, a weak version of Bill Clinton. Progressives who are still Democrats should be screaming about this – we should fight for our beliefs, even if we risk losing – but we won’t lose, if we get smart about messaging.
Thank you.
You guys are the best at what you do! Thanks again for making such an awesome resource.
Keep up the good work!
You do a good job with wonderful posters. Thanx & Merry Christmas
Keep up the good work. Well run site and I enjoy it immensely even though I disagree with most everything posted. But I like to engage, and BMG is great for that. Thanks for all your hard work.
More posts from idependent minded people.
Charley’s my favorite.
Your categories are very debatable…I’d never call Patrick progressive. I also don’t think BMG has a particular profile, and that’s one of its charms.
I don’t understand your fascination with EBIII. Your collective, regular promotion of his juvenile diaries reflects poorly on the BMG community.
Comment ratings aren’t important, and it would be kind of nice if they were done away with, or at least altered in some way or other.
thanks for what you do!
BMG is my central connection to the outside (political) world. Seriously! As BMG evolves, trust the instincts that got you this far. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. If it ain’t broke, DON’T FIX IT!
Why the hell are you e-mailing me? I have no idea who or what you are and I don’t live in the area you target. Also, nice try there asking how much people would donate to you and not giving the option of NOTHING. Have a nice day!
Keep improving how user friendly posting is.
Be more aggresive.
Keep a humorous tilt.
Stop claiming ownership (specifically copyright) of user comments. Saying “All content copyright BMG” may be legal but is certainly morally questionable in my opinion. Instead you might consider a “you own your own words” policy, wherein we grant a non-exclusive right to our words to BMG.
Keep up the great work. NO ONE else is doing what you are doing!
Did YOU read this? (Yes – Ed.)
Love you guys. Keep it up!
Love the site!!
You guys know how to rock a survey!
GOOD JOB!
Don’t make the mistake of slapping the editors’ name and face on this. The strength of BMG is the twenty or so main contributors, not just the three editors. The NFL builds the field and referees the game…but everyone watches because of the players.
Go on Jeff Santos’ show as regular commentators. It’s a great program.
you do a great job. Maybe when I retire in a year or so, I’ll have more time and energy to comment as well as to write in my own blog more often
font too small. hard to read. Only visit once in a while because it’s hard to read.
I stopped accessing BMG because it became a sounding board for the Massachusetts Democratic Party. No dissent, please.No forum for opposing ideas. No criticism of the Beacon Hill culture that is, frankly, corrupt.
Glad to have you guys and this forum here. Even though I don’t get much love most of the time. đŸ˜‰
It only works when it’s not an echo chamber. Encourage the debate from people who disagree, and stomp on the vitriol no matter who is spraying it.
It would be great to see BMG embrace its position as a powerful force in MA politics. More posts by prominent people in state government would be excellent.
Support Obama and drive a wedge into the Tea Party/Republican nonsense, and actively support progressive candidates, such as Mac Dellassandro and Phil Dunkelbarger, runniing people like them for local and state rep positions.
Chris Gabrielli didn’t get a fair shake from your site back when he was up against Deval Patrick in the democratic gubernatorial primary. Blue Mass was appeared to be already in the pocket of the Patrick campaign early on.
Keep it up, and keep it free!
I am not a troll. I follow your site so I can better understand why you(people on the left) think and believe what you do.
keep it up!
Keep up the good work
End anonymity. You can’t have a responsible conversation with people who don’t take responsibility for what they are saying.
Will you actually use the data collected in this field? Or is it just here to make me feel like you’ve given me an opportunity to express my views.
Thanks for asking, I read BMG almost every day, and recommend it to all my Dem friends.
“Respondents were 70 percent male and 28 percent female…”
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p>What’s going on there?
I find in my own job, when I request customers take those surveys you get bugged about, men are usually more receptive than women.
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p>I love taking surveys. I don’t really care what the subject is, either.
Thnks for sharing.
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p>I agree on the gender disparity; I would have expected some — 60-40 or so. But 70-28 is really striking. I wonder how that compares to other state blogs.
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There have been surveys about this, but all are anecdotal and limited by responders, who are self selected and not lurkers – also like much of BMG.
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p>But it seems that social networks are the greatest concentration of females, but the hurly-burly of message boards tends to run females off. Not out of cowardice, but more like – who NEEDS this crap – when inevitable gender based insults and ‘analysis’ begins.
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p>Really, BMG is better than most, as many message boards who have done surveys report 90 percent male on their surveys.
that so far, only men have commented on the datum that men answered BMG’s survey in much greater numbers than women. (I may be going out on a limb with afertig, but the odds are in my favor.)
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p>As the lawyers might say, “res ipsa loquitor” (the thing speaks for itself).
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p>I think Peter has a point about message boards generally (on “Men are from Mars/Women are from Venus” grounds), and JoeTS has a point, with respect to the survey in particular, that men are more eager than women to offer their opinions.
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p>I, a female person, answered the survey for the additional reason that I was pretty sure it wasn’t just about trying to sell me something. In fact, I imagine it was at least in part about trying to sell somebody else (advertisers) something. That would help to keep the site free of charge to those of us with opinions to share, and I’m good with that.
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And a bit to assess interest in various subscription options. In any event, however, there are no plans to make BMG’s content subscription-only.
BMG was right to be in Patrick’s corner in 2006. For all his shortcomings, Deval Patrick was the only progressive in the race. Chris Gabrieli was a member of the MA chapter of the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist group that promotes a Liebermanesque agenda. He would have been a terrible choice and I’m glad he’s given up on thoughts of elected office. Good riddance.
The comment wasn’t about whether Gabrieli would have been a good nominee. It was about the environment on BMG during the primary. You weren’t registered for that, but it was hostile — sometimes hysterical — toward any Democrat who did not sign up for the Deval train.
Compared to the rest of the internet, this site’s comments are much less hate-filled, misspelled, and shouty than many message boards.
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p>It even seems relatively tolerant of well-thought out different viewpoints.
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p>Not to say it couldn’t be better, but the comments on this site are definately above the average of the internet.
And a bit less prone to some of the sillier things one sees on Kos. Nevertheless, the spring and summer of 2006 were not fun times ’round here.
The most interesting take-away for me is that the average responder considers themselves to be somewhat more liberal than the site at large.
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p>Interesting, because the site is presumably largely made up of the postings of those who responded to the survey.
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p>Perhaps it’s a natural bias to consider oneself more radical than the norm, or perhaps the editors are more moderate than the average responder. Not sure what the reason is — but I thought that result interesting.
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p>I wonder if we are thinking of ‘timeliness’ in the same way? It seems, to me at least, the editors consider timeliness to mean ‘get the information up as soon as we know it’. But I think there is a broader definition (that ought to be) in play. Purely from a user perspective it’s often not timely for me to find out information here… precisely because the emphasis is to post or promote ‘new’ stories several times daily.
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p>There is a lot of duplication of stories (several posts, etc) and in comments. This means that facts and information are often duplicated. However, that duplication is simply the meeting of the overlapping information and so there is much more information that is not shared by the stories than is duplicated. So, for each narrative that emerges requiring several posts, each dealing with an aspect of the story, information exists in a spread out form; All this is just to say that the whole story can often be found here… that is after some digging is done. This is not, I daresay, what is meant by ‘timeliness’.
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p>I think that ‘timeliness’ and ‘follow-up’ are all of a piece and that you are relying on a lot of the users to either read everything, and thus correlate the info for themselves, or some vague attempt at ‘follow-up’ seeks to concatenate the information. This is, to some extent, the issue that ‘tags’ are supposed to address. But, to my mind, they do so only minimally.
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p>If I may be so bold as to propose what I would (try to*)do if were editor of a site like this: I would add, to the site and to the definition of ‘editor’, a little more meta; More links betwixt and between related stories as they are posted, perhaps even including methods for ‘folding’ one post up into another; more link backs to older posts with information that bears on both news and timeliness; more feel for the shape and heft of the conversation and a stronger feel for the narrative direction (including when it is going off into the weeds thanks to trolls…); and ‘roll-up’ or summary posts outlining facts.
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p>Just some suggestions for discussion…
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p>* {I have no idea if this is feasible, either economically or technically… but that’s never stopped my from suggesting solutions afore now… ]
And those posts could appear together when they leave the front page? Indeed, this would benefit posts that WEREN’T front paged but were still good and raised other points by being associated with the ‘major’ post in a ‘topics’ area.
How long did you spend on creating the survey and thinking up the questions? I agree with a number of the comments noting the absence of transgender options, refuse to answer options, and other categories (like education), etc. I was bothered by the political spectrum selection and assumptions about Patrick, “democrat” being equivelent with “progressive”, and so on.
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p>I’m not surprised by the overwhelming response of men. You got 3 guys running the show, an old boys network, if you will. Was there a question asking about race and/or ethnicity? I can probably predict those results too.
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p>But back to the creation of the survey- did you have anyone review it with a background in research and evaluation? Even if not in political research, an experienced researcher’s eyes would have been helpful and provided insight into the wording of the questions and the check box options. If you did have someone look it over, I’d be worried about the outcomes and results of that person’s research and their future career. Even if you guys weren’t trying to have too research-y a survey and not take the results too seriously, the results could have been more telling if it was not taken in such light.
In all, a fairly high information/time invested ratio I guess.
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p>I am sure all of the Editors agree it could have been much better, on the issues you cite as well as many others, but what it did yield was interesting.
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p>Personally, I am very gratified that free beer was the most popular subscriber benefit. Any other response would have been very worrisome.
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p>Thanks for your comment: we’ll bear it in mind next time!
=)
…that the readership will reflect the demographics of the editors? I don’t see anything about the content of this blog that is obviously skewed toward men.
Great, now BMG has to give him a raise!!
“Fascination” is too strong, but I do usually enjoy Ernie’s posts. Where is he (she)?