I am continuing to add to the ISOU Classic Section via Google's cache. This was one of my favorite pieces:

Open Letter to the Whales of the Lefty Blogsphere

In reading comments to my post yesterday about Big Left Wing
Blogs linking to and supporting smaller Blogs, I have received some
interesting comments. First let me say how grateful I am to TCF for linking to this post, and helping to broaden the discussion. TCF is one of my favorite blogs.

His strong, challenging voice, is one I respect and admire. I would nothave found him except through another blog that is off most people'sradar, the Legendary Nitecrawler, who's blog now seems to be inactive.

Michael of Comments from Left Field, points to the Daily Kos linking policy,

THE DAILY KOS LINK POLICY: As you can no
doubt tell, I am extremely stingy on links. As a marketing tactic,
that's not very smart -- link exchanges are a great way to promote
one's site. It's also not the best way to be a good blogosphere citizen -- I should be helping promote new up-and-coming blogs and playing nice with the established ones as well.
However, everything I do on this site I do for the benefit of my
readers. I've always thought that a short blogroll was of more use to
visitors than an endless list of random names, and for better or worse, that's the rule by which I now live.

While I have set the number of links on my blogroll in stone, its
contents are constantly evolving. I generally include sites I visit at least several times a week, a list that changes over time. So I often add and delete sites accordingly.
So how does a site get listed? Be noticed. Make a stir. Don't
regurgitate the contents of a news story, but provide perspective or
additional insight.

Be clever, funny, original. Get away from the default templates. Get away from Blogspot. Create your own identity. Your own domain. Have attitude. Be self-confident. Participate in the
comment boards at dKos or MyDD or Atrios or any number of other sites
(a great way to demonstrate your writing acumen). Participate in group weblogs like Stand Down or the Political State Report. Don't be
obnoxious or feel entitled to a link. Given my site's readership, have a heavy focus on elections and the political process. And while I appreciate any traffic you send my way, I don't care whether you link to me or not. Or how much traffic you send. Like I said already, I don't use my blogroll as a marketing tool.

Michael believes
Kos's approach is reasonable, and it is in the sense that a Blogroll is a personal thing, and should reflect what we are reading or at least what we believe worthy of reading. Where I differ from Kos is that I don't believe that because a person can not afford their own domain, or don't have the finances or technical ability to maintain one, that they are not worth reading.

But Blogrolling is NOT the point of this. It is supporting a sense of community, and encouraging smaller bloggers to exercise their voice.

Instapundit has helped launch many smaller blogs, simply by acknowledging their work. Many of those blogs who have benefited from an Instalanche, never make it onto Reynolds Blogroll, but he at least acknowledges
their work and their voice. Some of these blogs never see any long term benefit from an Instalanche, while others are discovered by an entire new audience. Where Kos is right is, it IS all about the writing.

I am no KOS, my biggest traffic day was probably 50 thousand visits
in a day, but I have a consistent readership in the thousands a day,
and I have always made it a point to promote bloggers who I enjoy. I
continue to believe that the way to strengthen our voice is to work
together. Appropriating the work of a smaller blogger, without attribution, is not the way to strengthen our voice or to encourage unity.

There is one other thing I agree with Kos on, I don't give a rats
ass if someone links to me. Ah there was a time when I did. But I
stopped caring about that a long time ago. My goals in achieving
notoriety in the blogsphere were achieved a long time ago. I now
content myself with writing what I want to write, when I want to write, and helping to promote other like minded, and sometimes NOT so like minded,blogs that I respect. I don't use linking as a Marketing tool either.

While I will often return a recipiricol link, many of the blogs I have linked to, I did so because they were cool.

Update: Tas makes a very good point!

Update II: Since I don't read Atrios on a Daily basis, I had not
noticed he had responded to the issue with Media Matters using Ron's work without
attribution. He addresses it here. The part that was most striking to me was this:

"I ran this blog a long time before I made a cent off of it.
I never expected to make a cent off of it. I hoped to have an impact but I've always been more than happy for people to steal my stuff. In
the past I've happily encouraged writers/reporters/editors to take
stuff without crediting me. There's still no better way to deligitimize a story in the mainstream press than to credit it to "some guy on the internet you've never heard of." Practically every time that happens it becomes a story about bloggers, rather than a story about the story - whatever it is. It's the collective small impacts I perceive this blog - and Left Blogistan generally - that I'm happy about, not for the most part the "scalps" or the "big stories bloggers unearth." My tendency is almost always to pull back on a story once it's "out there" rather than to jump all over it and try to make it my own. The satisfaction is in seeing the impact, not in getting credit."

Now that may well be true for Duncan, but as he acknowledges in the
same post, he has a successful blog that is making him money. Is his
own feeling about someone stealing his work supposed to justify what happened with Ron? Excuse the hell out of me, but I don't get it. Apparently neither did Tas...

"So is there an argument to be made for credit? Yes, because
when you credit somebody who does the initial work, you are also giving them support -- you are opening the door for them to continue working on a story that they are familiar with. And while Atrios frames the argument as us whining about not receiving credit, and suggesting that we reevaluate why we became bloggers in the first place, it's my contention that this is an oversimplification of the issues. There are more things on the table besides simple linking and credit. I, and imagine most other bloggers, would love to see the MSM rip off our work if it pumped the story out there to the masses. Sure, I'd feel slighted, but I'd get over it. But the issue here is credit and support within the blogosphere, and using that to our benefit so stories don't die. This, of course, feeds into the larger issue of my belief that the left's a-listers are serving as an echo chamber of only those a-listers where other opinions aren't allowed, which gets into the larger issue of who they link to and why some bloggers are left out
in the cold. The blogosphere isn't, nor will it ever be, perfect. But this fact shouldn't be used as an excuse for ignoring it's problems."

Duncan seems to think that "the little people," are amusing:

"Continuing from yesterday's amusing email, there seems to be some amount of general disgruntlement throughout parts of the blogosphere about people receiving appropriate credit and recognition, some green-eyed monster sniping at the "big bloggers," some kvetching about the Koufax awards (the most transparent and open awards process in the universe - it's an excuse for community, people, not the Pulitzers), along with the usual mutterings that your Pet Issue isn't the #1 topic in the blogosphere, etc..."

And gives us this stellar advice:

"While fully acknowledging that nothing and no one is beyond
criticism, that people have perfectly valid complaints about things,
that with great power comes great responsibility, and that the world is not the perfect meritocracy we all imagine it to be, at some point I have to say - get the fuck over yourselves and ask yourselves why you're doing this."

Have you ever stopped to consider that the reason we are "doing this," is because we believe in doing what's right? Or that "getting over ourselves," should be advice that you should first extend to yourself before you criticize someone else. I know Ronnie B. I have seen the blood, sweat and tears he puts into his blog. I have read his LONG pieces demonstrating his willingness to dig and research. While I probably would have never sent that email. I damned sure know where he is coming from. And I have been one of the people who has sent you an email asking you to support a post. Like the one on the missing young black woman from South Carolina. It was not a "Pet Issue," it was asking a colleague to help with a serious matter, that could have meant life or death for a young woman. You ignored it, interestingly enough, every Conservative Blog who I asked to post about it, DID! SO, as did many others, including Oliver Willis.
It was at that moment that you became irrelevant to me. You can have
your tens of thousands of readers, and your paycheck. I blog to make a difference, NOT to make a buck.

You had a chance to address Ron's concern and instead you treated
him like someone insignificant. But that is not the issue here. As long as the big lefty blogs continue to look at themselves as ABOVE the rest of the lefty blogsphere, you will consider to be treated by the Right as a bunch of whinny pansy boys, and we will continue to lose elections.

There is a scene in the movie Patton, where General Patton
is overlooking a battle with Rommel's Tank Corps. As his army routs the Germans, Patton screams, "I read your book, you magnificent bastard." You give some fairly good advice at the end of your excuse for stealing Ron's work. Now allow me to give you some. Read the Right's book, because all the whining in the world does not win battles or elections. Jeff Gannon is NOT Dan Rather... And George Bush is sitting in the White House. Maybe if we had done a little better coordinating our strategy during the November election, the results would be different, but then if that happened we wouldn't have four more years to whine would we, and you might just be out of business...

I personally don't give a rats ass if you ever link me or not. What I do care about is moving a progressive agenda, something we should be more focused on than our over inflated egos... ya think?

UPDATE III: Ron Brynaert responds in the first thread:

"Atrios kind of stuck up for me in the comments but as a
bigger blogger (and a former guest blogger at atrios...who ended up
linking to me a few times) said at a loaded mouth thread...he should
have put that in his post. But I do want to be clear that I wasn't accusing Atrios for not giving me credit. My beef, that day, was with Media Matters (and I was hoping Atrios would be able to help with that...I never meant to suggest that he was partly to blame for the omission) and with another couple blogs that did rip me off (but that's been more than patched up, resolved and forgiven...shit happens sometimes in the blogosphere...the truth is that I'd rather be ripped off by the left than to be ignored once I calm down from the shock of the theft) I wrote that letter to Atrios partly because of me and partly because I wanted the bigger bloggers to understand that there is a problem with the way things are. That we aren't as strong as the right because our big weapons are circle ----ers (i'm trying to be kinder and gentler this evening) and eli---ts. I wanted Atrios to post my letter...that's why i wrote it so over
the top...and I think he did it partly because he agreed to some degree with what I wrote...or at least that it deserved to be discussed...but I sure took a beating on his comments thread and mine...my e-mail made serious points that were ignored but it was definitely composed as partly satirical...but still...people are talking about it...making graphs etc...so that's awesome. As I wrote in that email and as I've written on my blog, Atrios is
one of my favorite bloggers...though I don't always agree with him.
Us left-leaning bloggers are a stubborn lot...we just hate being
told what to blog about...even if we know that it's something that we
should blog about. Sooner or later, the Atrioses and Koses are going to get the big picture. In order to really get our shit together we haveto make more of an effort to recognize all of the incredible voicesthat are out there. And those links are damn important. (hell...mygoogle ranking went down when I added the PBA blogroll to my blog...but
I don't care...) I've added a ton of links to my blog since the e-mail and I'm going to keep on doing so...nothing makes my blogging day more than stumbling upon yet another unknown blogger who had something incredible to say but hardly anyone is listening."

I thought it important to move Ron's comment front and center, since
his, ahem...Martyrdom on the alter of Atrios' ego was a big part of
this discussion for me. But the story of Media Matters appropriation of Ron's work and Atrios defense of it are symptomatic of a broader
problem that these series of post hoped to address. While there is
something to be said for the diversity of the Left sphere, there is no question that our lack of cohesion hurts us in creating buzz on issues we care about. From a strategic viewpoint, we get our ass kicked time and time again when it comes to focused attacks on the issues. Sitting back making self congratulatory comments and speaking of the "Conservative Echo Chamber," with disdain may make some of us feel better, but they won.... My son asked me the other day what I would do if I had an unlimited amount of money. My answer became very clear to me when composing this series....
Buy every damned Lefty Blogger a copy of Sun Tzu's, The Art of War. It is obvious some of us need to read it.

UPDATE III: Thanks Tas
for linking to this post. My trackbacks are not working right now so I
am never sure when someone TB's. I appreciate the support. If anyone
else has TB'd to these post, let me know and I will give you a TB so
you get the link.

I almost feel like putting up one of those damned posters on my Blog
like Oliver has for Britt Hume, "Still no Support for the Little Guys, Day XX" or whatever. Fact is, I don't really give a shit any more.