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Colorado / Denver Political Bloggers - Get Your Convention Blogging Credentials

This is awesome. The Democratic National Convention Committee has announced a credentialing process for bloggers so that bloggers can cover the event with permission and access that will help them get a scoop not unlike the old-school media. That blog post makes it clear that it will be in a separate "pool" which is a slight bummer, but giving bloggers the same access as old-school media is probably just forward leaning enough to make the old-school people pout. This is a great step for citizen media and freedom of speech.

Are You Cool Enough to Blog the Denver Democratic Convention?

The requirements they have for applying seem interesting.

To qualify as a state blogger, the applicant’s blog must have been in existence six months prior to requesting credentials and have at least 120 politically related blog posts. Bloggers must submit their daily audience and list their authority based on Technorati stats. Bloggers may also provide examples of posts that make their blog stand out as an effective online organizing tool and/or agent of change.

One other characteristic that I'd use if I were making the call would be the number of RSS feed subscribers. That's perhaps the most important metric to me about a blog (google reader, bloglines, and feedburner are common sources for that information). A check of inbound links (yahoo site explorer) is probalby also a good measure of what the world at large thinks about the site. I don't know much about how Technorati authority is calculated - maybe it tries to include things like this.

I think this is a decent vetting process. Surely they have similar rules for the old-school media - like the community newspaper from {random small town} may just have to get their DNCC coverage syndicated to them. This blogger-importance-verification seems like a reasonable set of tests.

Great idea. Looks like it will be reasonably executed. Thanks, DNCC!

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