a half-open thread begging for some group participation
By Winter Patriot on 7/8/2005, 3:12pm PT  

Guest blogged by Winter Patriot

I have a couple of questions for everyone: When did you start reading the Brad Blog? and Why did you keep coming back?

I may as well go first:

I don't know. Really. I honestly don't remember when or how I first landed at the Brad Blog, but I do remember that it looked a bit strange. OK, very strange. I hadn't seen a green-and-yellow blog before. Still haven't seen any others, now that I mention it.

But I spent quite a while reading, and I remember thinking "this Brad fellow is pretty good; I wonder why he hardly gets any comments". I didn't make any comments myself, though. Ahem. And I made a mental note to myself saying "come back soon". Which I promptly forgot...

I do remember my second visit. I got here on a link from BuzzFlash. The story was about the White House removing embarrassing material from their website. And it was a good one.

The White House Scrubs Historical Documents: Removes Pages of Historic Record from the White House Website

And there was more, including this:

More Scrubbing of White House Website!!! Audio & Video Removed!

Within a period of just a few weeks, Brad posted a whole series of articles about the same topic, as summarized here:

Highlights of our 'White House Website Scrub' reporting...: (Shrub Scrub? HTML-File-Gate?)

All this was before the election, before Clint Curtis came along, before the phony voters rights group ACVR. This was [to my knowledge] Brad's first investigative series, and it was fascinating to watch it all develop.

I watched from the sidelines, still thinking: "Why doesn't this blog get many comments?"

Eventually I made a comment myself, here.

Then things started to happen. I made a few more comments. One of them even drew a response from Brad. Pretty soon I was drawn into a discussion or two. And there was no looking back.

Before long I was reading old posts in the archives. And eventually I got a fairly clear picture of Brad and his Blog. Maybe it's not an accurate picture but at least it's fairly clear.

I see him as a fine researcher and a determined digger, a really nice guy who is very concerned about the state of the country and its direction and who is working hard to do something about it, a good creative journalistic writer and a very funny one too.

No, it's not all rose-colored glasses because I see the flaws as well. Sometimes he gets apostrophes in the wrong places. Sometimes he spells words wrong. Once in a while he even chooses the wrong word.

I started sending Brad e-mail saying things like "it's democratic not demmocratic" or "you should be saying its not it's" ... and "you're too good to be making these kinds of mistakes" ... and Brad would make the changes in his posts. Eventually he realized that it would be a lot easier for both of us if he gave me the keys to the blog. So now if he misspells a word, it's still his fault. But if that mistake remains on the blog for very long, it's my fault too.

One thing led to another ... having made a few short comments I then started making the occasional long one, and eventually I could see that I needed my own blog. So I started one, but I kept returning to The Brad Blog, kept making dumb comments here, kept fixing the typos, even deleted some spam once in a while ... after a while there came a time when Brad needed to hit the road and he offered me a chance to do some guest blogging ... scary stuff, that, at first! ... and the rest, as they say, is a mystery!

They do say that, don't they?

OK, enough about me. Let's talk about Brad. Let's talk about you.

When did you start reading the Brad Blog?

and Why did you keep coming back?

This item is part of the First Annual BRAD BLOGATHON, conceived and implemented by readers of The BRAD BLOG! Please help keep Brad blogging. You can click HERE to donate using PayPal or your credit card, or click HERE to donate using snail mail. Many thanks on behalf of Brad and the Bloggers behind the Blogathon!
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