If this were say academia, corporate America or some other aspect of the Democratic process, would you accept the argument you just made as a valid?

I don't think its important that everyone blogs, nor is it important that the blogosphere become less upper income and white. Trust me on this: the great majority of local social/political activists have little time for blogging. A lot of people who have been around a long time have no idea what a blog is, but they do know how to get people to the polls or get petitions recognized. Some people can get a march organized and see to it that its reported on. Dome know how to get a face to face meeting with a legislator. Ultimately, thats how the power is allocated: at the polls, not online.

What is important, however, is that the blogosphere does not turn into an isolated, reclusive, self-important and ultimately elitist group. Bloggers must understand that we are not the sole arbiters of how things should be. Bloggers are one voice among many. If bloggers remember that they are not the progressive movement all by themselves, they'll continue to grow and add more diverse audience naturally.

embrace and extend, in a nutshell. To build a progressive movement, the need is to articulate progressive solutions and principles from within pre-existing orgs.

Remember Francis Holland---he would have been a great blogger if not for his attitude and behavior.

Blogging is rapidly changing and we are seeing that more in the progressive blogosphere. In 2004 there were few liberal blogs now there are many of them and each is developing niche demographics of their own. Sites get front pagers on their site who came from other sites. There is outflow from the larger blogs as people move to new and niche blogs.

I think of it in a way like television was many years ago. At first there were only the on the air stations which you could access with an antenna. With the development of CATV and satellite many more hundreds of choices developed.

There are also new forms of blogging such as micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiko) where you can blog from your cellphone or instant messenger and blogs are now on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc. Sites like MySpace have more members and blog posts than all of the liberal/progressive blogosphere combined.  

It is a constantly evolving process.

I think Chris is right, not everyone has to blog, but given that, the important thing to keep in mind is the relationship between the blogosphere and the rest of the progressive movement. It should be equal and collaborative, and people should work in coalitions with broader, more-representative of-America groups on common issues or campaigns to avoid the dangers of becoming isolated, self-important and elitist.

I haven't seen much of this coalition work in my own experience, but I hope it is happening elsewhere and would love to hear stories. If not, we should start talking about ideas on how to make it happen.

I dropped out of college to work races, I'm proud I'm contributing to the diversity of the blogosphere!

Of course we want diversity in the blogosphere.

We want the blogs to reflect the party and the nation...not perfectly...but as much as possible.

Seems to me, Chris, that you can work to do just that, and have, with BlogPac and your work increasing the diversity of voices on the Front Page here.

I think your third paragraph, "Not everyone has to blog" is the kernal of what you were trying to say.  ie. When you are on these panel discussions  on diversity in the blogosphere, you find yourself pointing out that "housing activists" say, shouldn't have to the think that because "blogging is this big thing" that they have to blog a la MyDD.  Not all organizations are going to find a blog like MyDD to be the most useful tool.

I'm getting that point.

But your next paragraph is baffling. You write:

However, none of this means that every single person involved in progressive politics needs to participate in the blogosphere. We don't need to make sure that everyone and everything in progressive politics are engaged with, and represented in, the progressive blogosphere.

I don't see this or agree with it. It almost has an implication that a) you don't care how diverse MyDD is or isn't  (which I know isn't true) and b) you're not interested in doing what most every other progressive organization that falls into the demographic breakdown you're describing (white and wealthy) puts into its mission statement: outreach.

That's was the failure of the blogger's brunch. The point of the "blogger's brunch" story was that there already was a wide range of bloggers of color and diverse voices out there. Peter Daou just didn't make sure that they were sitting at the table. He didn't do enough outreach.

My question after reading this post, espcially given your influential voice, Chris, is: what message are you sending to campaigns and organizations with this? My shorthand, and unfair, summary would be: "Blogs, We're mostly wealthy and white, it's alright, blogging's not for everybody."

(But we both know that this flies in the face of what I see here in CA and I'm sure is true in Philadelphia...every last demographic group is clamoring to communicate using new media...the relevant fact is, however, folks just aren't all coming to dkos and MyDD.)

Now, I want to be clear, I don't think that's what you're trying to say here, and I'm not trying to offend or misread. But that's what paragraph four seems to imply. And that's what I don't get.

For me, "Different means of engagement" means that different folks are going to use online resources and tools in different ways, but, we're all online and will be more and more in one way or another. (Texting, Mobile browsing, Ipod downloads etc. etc.)

We should not exempt any one group from the obligation to reach out and communicate and learn from what others are doing online and with new media means of communication.  We should strive to make what any one of us is doing more relevant and accesible to all of our colleagues and allies.

I think the challenge isn't making the blogs "more diverse" so much as it is making them more broadly relevant, engaged and networked with the entire Democratic constituency.  Outreach and interaction are hard work...but that hard work, imo, pays off.

I hope folks don't read your post and think it's okay to chuck outreach out the window.

If NBC hadn't made an effort to diversify its staff over the past ten years Imus would never have been fired.  That was the first time in my life that I can remember minority voices being listened to--or to put another way, the first time I saw corporate America listen to minority voices.  It was historic.    Not too many white reporters/NBC staffers were saying: I won't go on his show. I think that he should be fired.

If blogs don't attempt to diversify in all ways they will never be able to play a leadership role in the progressive movement.

To be progressive means to consider the needs of all people.  In order to do that you must come in contact with all kinds of people.  You must ask people what they think, want and need.  How they would fix it if they could.  In other words, you can't speak for the oppressed from an ivory tower.

I'm not sure how to say this best, and this may be getting a bit off topic, but:

What really interests me here is why these lack-of-diversity situations develop. In the specific case of Chris's article here, there's a bit of a fuzzy distinction made between "the blogosphere", "the progressive political blogosphere" and "mydd and affiliated sites like DailyKos". We're given demographic data for the third of these things, but not the first. This makes it hard for me to tell: Is what has happened that the blogosphere is not diverse? Or is what has happened that the specific community within the blogosphere where MyDD exists is not diverse?

In other words: Is the problem getting a more diverse set of people to blog? Or is the problem that we have diverse groups of people blogging, but there is de facto segregation in the communities which people blog in? And if the latter, then what is keeping this segregation going?

This is interesting to me not just as a follower of the progressive political blogosphere, but as someone who is and has been involved in general in the building of internet communities. In particular I've been trying [failing] to start a blogging community of my own recently, and this is something that's been bugging me.

Once upon a time, I'd have said, well, this is the Internet. Conventional wisdom is that pasty white males from academia tend to make up most of any potential Internet readerbase. However, this is demonstratably no longer the case. The internet of today is actually quite integrated.

Yet, a lot of sites I've personally followed recently still get into that sort of same demographic trap that Chris describes "the progressive political blogosphere" as being in: almost everybody is male, white and either in or recently in either suburbia or a college. It seems like once sites get homogenous in this way, they tend to stay homogenous in this way. My personal experience has left an impression that a site which, for example, has sizable and noticeable female membership from the beginning tends to not have trouble attracting women later on, whereas a site whose community is already overwhelmingly male has a lot of trouble attracting new female readership even with all other things being equal. I'm not sure how one breaks this cycle once it starts.

Chris's conclusion, looking at the relatively homogeneous landscape of bloggers connected to his site, if I'm understanding it correctly is that while he feels it absolutely essential that the progressive political blogosphere be inclusive of people outside its currently dominant demographic, he doesn't feel particularly feel obligated to actively go out of his way to find ways to change those demographics; his conclusion as I'm understanding it seems to be from the perspective that the progressive political blogosphere isn't so much important as a community as a tool for social change, that it is more important as a part of a wider progressive movement than it is important on its own, and that if this particular splinter of the wider progressive movement is not demographically representative of the whole thing, well, that's how the cards fell. I think from the perspective of an administrator of MyDD, this is a generally reasonable position; the focus of the operators of this site, as far as I can tell, has always been on writing rather than community-building.

However, this analysis doesn't help much from the perspective of someone who is interested in community-building for its own sake, and thus sees promotion of diversity within internet communities as potentially an end in itself. In my case for example I tend to find that internet communities that get too homogeneous, that don't have a range of experiences in the userbase, tend to get boring and stale after awhile, and in the case of the communities I've been working with building of late I'm interested in how to get lots of diverse kinds of people involved from the beginning. I'm not really sure how to do this, though. My own personal contacts of late that I would invite to join something like a blog circle are mostly through video game sites-- which in general are communities already with a bias toward that homogeneous male/white/"geek" culture that also seems to comprise so much of the progressive blogosphere. If I work with just the people I already know, I inherit the relatively homogeneous demographics of the communities I've been involved with. The problem of communities becoming homogeneous is self-propagating, and I'm trapped inside of it.

I wish I knew the solution to this. How does one reach out to people unlike oneself when building an internet community?

I am with kid oakland on this - outreach is important. While not everyone has to blog, neither should we settle for what we have now. Especially as the blogosphere gains access to the halls of power - a voice, influence, financial clout - it becomes very important that we remain not just open and accessible to new voices, but that we find ways to actively bring new people in.

If one of the keys to blogging's importance is access to information - and I believe it is - then it becomes even more important that we connect with populations that are currently not well represented here.

... this diary provides a great summation of the absurdity of the constant "Obama doesn't engage the blogosphere enough" argument.

We are not irrelevant, to be sure. Yes, we collectively have an out-sized influence on the political landscape. But, in actuality, we collectively represent such a tiny minority of the voting public.

Though Edwards seems to have made the calculation that courting white, male, affluent, highly educated, non-believers is an important key to victory. That the media assist and potential to ignite the ground game will ultimately be beneficial.

But, on the other hand, simply put, Obama doesn't seem to think we're essential to winning.

I suspect he's right.

Of course, blogging is not the only way to make an impact, but it is one way.   Once you establish a niche, you have a responsibility to make it the best you can, to the best of your abilities.  You can make a real difference, increase diversity and numbers by making this site the highest quality your talent can make it.  Reading, commenting and writing blogs can have the potential to impact the debate and serve as a portal for people to become engaged and inspired and think about how to make a greater (or different) commitment in other ways.

Once you write a post, spend an extra hour and ask yourself what links or analysis can I make to make the post better.  In my opinion, this site could use a daily female blogger (who has to be tough to deal with the harshness and immaturity of some commenters) and you should be able to do something about that.

Quality will broaden your impact.  You want proof?  Look at a progressive superstar blogger in the making: Glenn Greenwald at Salon.  What is going on over there is exciting and that is largely due to the quality of his blogging.  I do not know the diversity of his readers, but he is attracting high quality commenters and getting some big shots to react to him.  What more could  you ask for?  

    WTF? A few things. One, the average income in the US is 70-80k, so people who read blogs are average Americans, and not wealthy. Did you mean Median income? Also, people with Advanced degrees make on average over 100k a year, so if 40-50% of the readership has advanced degrees, then either the other half is making 40-60K, which is at least 15% less than the US income average, or the people with advanced degrees are poorer than those in the US on average (PHDs in English and Anthropology instead of MBAs, MDs, and JDs).

I am a Local Union President of CWA telecom workers and to reach my members I use an information tape they can call; a Local website; leaflets, meetings.  I have discovered that I must to all of them to reach my members. Despite working with technology all day long, most of them have never seen a blog. I agree the progressive movement can not be locked in to any one form of communication. Right now we are having a fight with an employer over what employees are allowed to access on the internet from work.  For many workers their company connection is the only one they have. If they lose this access and I don't provide other means of communication with them, they will not be fully involved.  The point I am trying to make is that the key issue is not who VOLUNTARILY uses the "blogosphere;" it is guaranteeing everyone affordable access so they can use it if they want.   That is something the progressive movement needs to fight for.

I am realllllly late to this thread. I found it via a new blog from Jim Hansen, the former ID-02 congressional candidate from last year, who is writing a new blog through his organization United Action for Idaho.

http://www.unitedactionforidaho.org/

I have an interesting perspective on this. I spend about half my time blogging and doing netroots outreach on a professional basis. I worked last year for the Larry Grant for Congress campaign and am currently on part time with Larry LaRocco for Senate.

The rest of my working hours, I spend researching and writing for the Study Circles Resource Center, an organization that helps all kinds of people - including communities of color - work for positive change around issues including racism, the achievement gap, growth and sprawl, etc. Typically, I  write stories for their website.

http://www.studycircles.org/en/index.asp x

There's currently no blog, but we're talking internally about using existing blogs - including public policy blogs like Kos and My DD - to help spread these stories.

Given the low readership of most blogs, I think the key toward a more diverse blogosphere is to get more diverse voices on the well-read blogs.  (I just surfed over to HuffPo and see that 11 of the 12 current featured posts are by white folks, mostly guys.)

The other part of the picture is lifting up blogs written by people of color and trying to drive more eyeballs to their sites. Here are two I like:

http://www.thesuperspade.com/

http://lareinacobre.blogspot.com/ (presently inactive, it seems, but there's some beautiful writing on there ...)

The whole deal behind study circles (and the larger democratic governance movement) is that the more diverse voices we can bring together to work on an issue, the better conclusions we'll get.  For that reason, diversity in the blogosphere isn't a luxury - it's essential.