Y'all may or may not be familiar with the huffington post. If you're not, they are the same as Slate, only much MUCH younger and way WAY more influential and successful. So I got the below email from them, skimmed it, and chuckled to myself. Call me crazy, but in my perverse little universe the huffington post is what Slate could have become (read: relevant), if only they'd listened to me. So there's that little pleasure, and it is my main reason for sharing the email with you here, but second will be the carnival of the bizarre feeling I'll get to experience in the days, weeks, months to come as I swing through BOTF out of really bad habit to find that in spite of what that email says about Slate and the Fray, y'all are still here.

Hi,

It's the electoral race of the century. Political maps are being redrawn, and rules are getting rewritten across the board. Fundraising records have been broken. The candidates are even comparing the sizes of their email lists.

The mainstream media is tripping over itself to report on every last press release and campaign announcement. But do any of us REALLY know what's going on?

With you helping from the frontlines, the Huffington Post can change campaign coverage. OffTheBus is HuffPost's citizen-powered and -produced election site, and we're depending on readers like you to tip us to what's going on or, better yet, to write up the stories you think should be covered.

WOULD YOU HELP US? JOIN HUFFINGTON POST'S OFFTHEBUS.
Click here to sign up.

Chances are you're a political junkie. That's why you got involved in HuffPost's community as a commenter. But why stop there?

By becoming a member of HuffPost's OffTheBus, you can publish op-eds and news stories to the Huffington Post. You get first-hand access to editors. The best citizen reporting is cross-posted to the politics page and homepage. Or, you can jump into our collaborative reporting assignments, like our Superdelegate Investigation or OffTheBus Party Map.

GET PUBLISHED AT HUFFINGTON POST.
Click here to sign up for OffTheBus.

Last October OffTheBus members dropped in on Sen. Barack Obama's Nationwide Canvassing Day from more than two dozen locations. Hours later every observer independently relayed to us that the economy, not the war, was the voting issue. Twenty-four hours later we reported on the significance of the economy, beating the mainstream media to the punch by a few weeks.

As our numbers grow, the same collaborative reporting model that got HuffPost's OffTheBus the scoop on the economy may tell us a lot more about what's happening nationwide.

YOU GAME? JOIN HUFFPOST'S OFFTHEBUS.
Click here to sign up.


Best,
The OffTheBus team -- Amanda, Marc, and John
<link>

breathing and to hear about your latest 'most-perfect if-only-they'd- listened-to-me' discovery. this one sounds really exceptional. way better than this place. we'll probably all go over there tomorrow am. see you then.

OK, Arianna wants to be Markos. You want to be a relevant writer. Great, go do that. Just don't let the door...oh, who am I kidding, you're not going anywhere.

If I were you, I'd concern myself a little more with my own inability to really leave this place once and for all and a little less with anybody else's inability to do so.

Ender's just doing his green thing.

Thanks for sharing that form letter with everyone.

Hope your various projects are going well. I see your point about Off the Bus, but I find Huffington Post annoying. But perhaps making me feel annoyed is a prerequisite for relevance these days (theory confirming examples -- Drudge, the Olympics, NASCAR, Will Smith, anything on cable except Entourage, and Scalia).

I'm glad you're still thinking about this stuff. I haven't done much with it in these circles, but I found your ideas about online interactions really useful for teaching. Wish I were doing more with what you've done with wikifray. So thanks, but mostly just "hi."

I found your ideas about online interactions really useful for teaching.

I'm curious what ideas you're referring to. I've had some more experiences with online interactions in the last while, and I've come up with some new ideas about all that. I don't feel okay discussing them in public just yet.

I've also been sitting on a BOTF post for the wikifray forever. Perhaps I'll clean it up and post it.

Nice to see you survived your commute ;)

Do the Economist's View and Angry Bear stuff. Much more of a challenge

.

Hi Dawn,

My sense is that anybody on BOTF with an interest in wikifray knows that it is there. Probably that's also a better place to talk about this stuff. I don't have any great theories about how people act, just some thoughts on how to use blogs, wikis, etc in teaching. I haven't even been particularly successful by most measures, but course blogs do seem to have effects on how students relate to one another in the classroom. Sometimes this is good (better sense of where student is in relation to rest of class, more give and take) and sometimes bad (sense that everything to be said was written in blog, so why say anything in class). I've wanted for ages to submit something to Schad about it, but there's just not enough there for an article, really.

What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Maybe.

Hey run, you reminded me that I've been meaning to ask you if you knew about this guy. I read his blog pretty regularly, and he seems really insightful...

wikifray post: I was going to highlight the blogs we're linking from wikifray - all fraysters, all of the ones I could find that aren't parodies of other fraysters. We're even linking Jack Dallas' blog. I'd like to have everyone that has one linked from there.

other stuff: I've been meaning to reply to your post over there, so I'll meet you over there, whenever you have the time.

august:

So many out there. Just added him to the list. Try Bruce Webb for Social Security.