About a day after I found Zephyr Teachout’s new Zonkette weblog other websites started to link to her. I was checking in on my refer stats earlier and noticed my website has been visited by the State Department, NBC, the FDA and others searching for Zonkette.
Zephyr’s “Financially Interested Blogging” blog entry has been linked up all over the web the past couple of days. She changed her name from “Z” to her real name on her blog recently, too.
It looks like Zephyr didn’t want her blogspot blog to be found. Oops! The best way to not let something get out to the world wide web masses is to keep the words on our computers or behind a password protected directory. I found the Zonkette blog because it was linked on the “Z” name Zephyr used on the participants discussion thread on the “Blogging, Journalism and Credibility” event website.
I certainly didn’t expect it to be picked up by anyone (this is a temporary blog I was using (at the time) for links for the conference), and I’m mad that its been misused, but I think talking openly about this stuff is important.
Henry Copeland of Blog Ads wrote on his blog about the Wall Street Journal’s article covering this “story” about the Dean campaign paying bloggers/consultants.
Newsflash: there’s a world of difference between people like Williams who hide payments that have an contracted goal of sweetening his public statements, and people like Moulitsas Zuniga and Armstrong who go out of their way to publicize financial relatonships that might impact their opinions.
Update 15 January: So, this is weird. I mentioned yesterday that I found Zephyr’s new blog because she used it as the link for her initial “Z” in a comment she wrote on the participants list discussion thread for the “Blogging, Journalism and Credibility” conference. The comment doesn’t seem to be there anymore.
Update 15 January Part II: Rebecca MacKinnon pointed out in a comment to this entry that there’s one Zephyr comment on the conference blog but it’s noted with her full name. That’s not what I remembered seeing. Either I’m misremembering where I saw it or it was removed. That’s what I get for not making note of specifically where I saw it.
Comments
3 responses to “The Not-So-Mysterious Z”
Pretty crazy, huh? Quite a sh*tstorm she’s stirred up. The timing with Dean’s DNC run is pretty damn unfortunate. S’gonna be mentioned by more than a few televised talking heads over the weekend.
“Didn’t expect it to be picked up by anyone.” Yeah, not linking it at the event site would have been a solid first step.
In clearing out hundreds of comment spammies, I accidentally deleted Rebecca’s comment. Oops.