Should Blogs Be Independent of, or Integrated in, Their Host Organization’s Web Site?

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Work Smarter, Not Harder

Congratulations to Citizens Against Government Waste, which recently launched a blog, Swineline. Unfortunately, Swineline suffers from the same irritant that afflicts the blogs of the Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Project on Government Oversight: It resides on a domain independent of the host organization (e.g., www.swineline.org instead of www.cagw.org/blog).

To me, this is myopic and counterproductive. Why build and drive people to an entirely new site when, by integrating the blog into your already developed site, you can centralize your traffic?

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Gotcha

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Hand in Cookie Jar

To both protect oneself and to target one’s opponent, David All has proposed “five essential tips for the YouTube campaign trail.” His suggestions are groundbreaking and thoughtful, but I’d like to add one more, albeit unrelated to YouTube: Develop software to download your opponent’s Web site once a day. You need not download the whole site, but, like a good backup program, only the pages that have changed since the last download.

Savvy readers will point out that Google already caches pages for free. In fact, Google’s cache was the source of this gotcha blog post by the Politico’s Ben Smith. This method is fine if you know that a change occurred within the past week or so, but if you don’t, your only other option is the Wayback Machine, which archives entire sites, but only twice a year.

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