DailyKos

From dKosopedia

The internet blog Daily Kos was created by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga on May 26, 2002. Its focus is on political analysis, helping the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, and activism for left-of-center causes.

1 Site Growth and Software
2 Main Daily Kos Bloggers
3 Current Status
4 Other Resources

Site Growth and Software

Traffic grew rapidly, and the blog had its millionth page served on February 18, 2003, its 1,000th post and 30,000th comment on February 21, 2003, and a month later was clearly starting to outgrow Movable Type, its original software platform.

Daily Kos became an early adopter of Scoop as its platform, opening its Scoop incarnation on October 13, 2003, and shutting down the original Movable Type site on October 15, 2003. The original site's contents have been archived at DailyKos.net.

In addition to the usual blog postings by Markos and his guests, the new Scoop site allowed every user who signed up for an account to effectively create their own mini-blog. They could also add comments to every post, whether created by Markos, one of his guest bloggers, or by normal users. This transformed Daily Kos into much more than an online political blog, but rather an online community, where visitors became contributors, and activists could exchange ideas and experiences in a very user-friendly format. Scoop also allowed community self-policing, where users could rate comments of other users. Trusted Users—users rated highly by other users, and who had been at the site for a while—could rate highly disruptive comments as "trollish".

The site continued to add useful functionality. Recommended Diaries were introduced on August 10, 2004, diary tagging debuted on October 10, 2005, and in March 2006 a set of new site-specific enhancements commissioned by Markos and layered atop Scoop allowed for much improved performance with fewer screen refreshes, more powerful searching of posts and comments, and a new, simplified system for rating user comments. This last set of enhancements were considered to be DKos 3.0, with Movable Type having been DKos 1.0, and the initial Scoop deployment DKos 2.0.

At the present time, plans are in the works for DKos 4.0, which would be independent of the Scoop platform, and contain far more community-building features and opportunities for individual members to take center stage. This is a huge design and development effort, and Markos has stated that current plans are to release DKos 4.0 after the November 2008 presidential election.

Main Daily Kos Bloggers

Over the years, several other individuals have assisted Markos—who took the username kos under Scoop—in writing the front page blog posts, administering the site, and selecting diaries for promotion. See also the article on Daily Kos Front Pagers. Variously dubbed the "irregulars," "guest bloggers," "Contributing Editors," and "front pagers," here is a chronological list of these people with links to their first article as a formal front-pager; those listed with an asterisk are still Contributing Editors today:

Billmon (January 3, 2003)
Steve Soto (January 4, 2003)
Steve Gilliard (April 3, 2003)
RonK, Seattle (April 11, 2003)
Meteor Blades* (September 19, 2003)
DHinMI* (September 19, 2003)
Melanie (October 24, 2003)
Trapper John* (January 15, 2004)
theoria (April 2, 2004)
DemFromCT* (April 2, 2004)
DavidNYC* (December 3, 2004)
kid oakland (December 3, 2004)
Hunter* (December 4, 2004)
Armando (December 4, 2004)
a gilas girl (December 4, 2004)
Plutonium Page* (March 31, 2005)
georgia10* (December 15, 2005)
SusanG* (December 15, 2005)
mcjoan* (December 15, 2005)
DarkSyde* (December 16, 2005)
BarbinMD* (December 1, 2006)
Kagro X* (December 1, 2006)
Devilstower* (December 1, 2006)
MissLaura* (December 1, 2006)
brownsox* (December 3, 2007)
Scout Finch* (December 4, 2007)
smintheus (December 5, 2007)

Daily Kos has had other writers who regularly posted to the front page. Now called Featured Writers, people who have contributed in this manner include Jerome Armstrong (2003), Stephen Yellin aka Mr Liberal (2003), Tom Schaller (2004), Bill in Portland Maine* (2005), and Adam B* (2005).

Current Status

As of September 25, 2008, Daily Kos has more than 186,000 registered member accounts, and remains the most heavily trafficked political blog on the internet.