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At the Scott Walker victory party last night, a number of people mentioned Gop3.com and immediately pulled out their Blackberries. It got me thinking, what if we customized the site so that it looked great on all mobile devices, including Blackberries, Smartphones and Windows Mobile (even some cell phones)? After some research and installation, we have implemented this new theme through a mobile blog plugin.

Care to see the new Mobile Gop3.com ? Just go to http://gop3.com right now on any mobile device!

Most Viewed Posts

2007 was a great year on Gop3.com, we had well over 120,000 unique visitors and, more importantly, I very involved community that shared their ideas in an average of ten comments per post. Here are the top ten most popular posts this year:

1. 1. Support Our Troops - Remember Me by Lizzie Palmer
2. 2. Banned By Digg for Aiding and Abetting the Conservative Cause
3. 3. Gores Mansion vs Eco Friendly Bush Home
4. 4. New Poll: Who Would You Vote for in the Republican Primary
5. 5. Hillary Clinton Communist Quotes Quiz
6. 6. Who is Former Senator, Possibly President, Fred Thompson?
7. 7. The Right Brothers: Solid Conservative Rock
8. 8. Be Very Scared Liberals
9. 9. 4 Steps to More Conservative Influence Through Digg
10. 10. MY Bumpersticker Message

Author Distribution

Here is the breakdown of posts on Gop3.com by author in 2007.

Top Ten Cities in Wisconsin by Visitors

This is a quick breakdown of the ten cities in Wisconsin that you visited from this year. The grey slice is all the rest of Wisconsin.

Most Emailed Posts

Here are the posts you emailed to your friends the most this year (well there are 2 from 2006, see if you can pick them out):

1. Saturday at the Wisconsin Federation of College Republicans Convention
2. Links to each of the Simul-Liveblog Posts for the WICR State Convention
3. An Uphill Battle for Ziegler
4. New Poll: Who would you vote for in the Republican primary?
5. I hate to be the one to say this
6. A look into WICRs
7. An Activist No Doubt
8. Gates and Buffett Form Largest Philanthropic Foundation
9. Be Very Scared, Liberals
10. Marquette University Basketball Coaches Rollin’ in Hummers

Top Ten States by Visitors

This is a quick breakdown of the ten states that we got the most traffic from this year. The grey slice is all the other states not listed, combined. The orange slice is … Canada? Puerto Rico? I have no idea, they were unresolvable.

Favorites in the Categories

Our categories here at Gop3.com are anything but standard, these posts are the favorites of people browsing through the categories:

1. Video of Professor McAdams on Glenn Beck
2. Operation Red, White and Blue a Success!
3. Newt Gingrich as the next Barry Goldwater?
4. Apathy: The Only Barrier to Student Turnout
5. A New Reformation: The Church of the Talents
6. Gop3.com The Forum: Georgetown vs Marquette, Dominic James going pro?
7. Gop3.com To Liveblog the Wisconsin College Republicans State Convention
8. Wednesday Hero: Lance Cpl. Cory Jamieson
9. Wednesday Hero: Cpl. Jordan M. Moehnle
10. Live Blogging Sen. Sam Brownback at the GOP Wisconsin Convention

Final Thoughts

This year was up and down for Republicans, we had our small victories within Wisconsin and on the national level but, we all are hoping (an blogging) for the best in 2008. We at Gop3.com work hard “Fighting Like Warriors and Thinking Right. Systematically Debunking Liberal Rhetoric” from the unique perspective of college students and recent graduates. We appreciate your readership and are proud of the active community we have helped to create here. Each of us would like to thank you personally for reading in 2007 and we look forward to your comments in 2008.

We hope you had a Merry Christmas and wish you the best in 2008!

There are many articles available across the internet like “How to be a better blogger” or “100 ways to blog better”, their common denominator is that every blog should be focused on a narrow area that the bloggers have a passion for. Gop3.com obviously majors in conservative political blogging and Marquette University with a minor in more philosophical political theories. We’ve nailed it for over two years and we’ll continue to nail it however, some of the bloggers here have other passions, I would like to quickly direct you to their other blogs for your perusal. Mind you, Gop3.com will remain a top priority.

Debate, Discuss, Decide is a blog put out by Daniel Suhr and his colleagues at the Marquette University Federalist Society. Daniel, the president of the organization, and others opine on legal issues and conservative law school life. This site is on the blogroll as MU Federalist Society.

NewlyCorporate.com is a blog I am introducing today that I have been working on for some time now. The blog is aptly described in it’s tagline as “Work, life and the pursuit of happiness for the young professional.” The bloggers are young professionals who write on a number of different work/life areas from leisure (food, restaurants, beer) to productivity, web 2.0 and office humor. They are located in Minneapolis, Seattle, Milwaukee and Brussels, Belgium. I have added this site to our blogroll under Personal Capitalism. Note: Daniel Suhr is not the Dan that blogs on NewlyCorporate.com.

Everywhere we look today we can see children exposed to the big government, ask-and-it-shall-be-yours attitude that can encourage a later belief in the nanny state.

Let’s start with a seemingly innocent example that my mother presented: mission trips through church. Most churches offer the opportunity for kids to go on mission trips, whether organized by the church or through other means. However, when it comes to funding these trips, what do kids do? The are encouraged to send letters out to family and friends asking for money. It’s for a good cause right? Sure, but, what does the government do when they decide they want money for a given project? Ask, or more often, take our money to support these causes. By using this funding model we are encouraging a new generation of nanny staters and developing their reliance on others along with their penchant for asking for money. (My parents found a unique way to raise this money through encouraging kids to do yardwork in exchange for donations from families.)

How about the common structure of allowance for children. Most of the kids I grew up with got a certain amount each week before they were old enough to be able to get a job. Even if it was a very small sum, they got the same amount whether their chores where done on time, well, or extremely late. Everything was a game to see how little you could do. Some parents would cut off funding for a complete lack of performance but, it never really rewarded high quality work. Sound like a familiar union attitude to you? This structure only minimally encourages performance and lacks transparency.

What other options do parents have though? They are busy working hard to provide for their families and this is the way it has been done in the past, it’s too much work to bill hourly, check everything, etc. Today, I came across a great option that is easy to use, encourages fiscal responsibility and will bring out the spirit of capitalism in even the youngest workers.

Payjr is an online site that helps kids learn tech skills and encourages a universally applicable work ethic. It keeps everything organized for parents and will, as the site says, “Teach Kids Responsibility”. I would definitely reccomend giving it a try. If you like it, please provide feedback in the comments of this post for other parents.

As we have done for the past 2 years running, Daniel and I, along with Justin, will be liveblogging the Wisconsin College Republicans’ state convention this evening and tomorrow. Watch Gop3.com for up-to-the-minute information on the state elections (including the hotly contested race for WICR chair) as well as general commentary and speech analysis.

This PoliTech post was meant to be an introduction for politicos to Spotplex.com, a new Digg competitor that ranks news and blog posts according to the number of times they have been clicked on versus a Digg/Bury system that liberals have used to game Digg and ban conservatives. I will still link to spotplex, it has great potential but, it’s entire political section is currently useless because it is dominated by “gay news daily”.

Spotplex.com monitors the popularity of each post and blog by how many times it has been viewed through an image installed on the blog. Bloggers can request to participate on the site. This is great because it is not susceptible to any group intentionally “burying” a story so it gets less exposure. However, Spotplex has fallen prey to another problem, they have allowed blogs to pick their own categories without moderating them.

The political category of Spotplex.com now is completely dominated by a gay news site because, per the system, it gets the most hits. However, many of their posts are about things like the current top hit, “Ace Young Flexing More Than His Musical Chops” and other things completely unrelated to politics but nonetheless highly ranked on the page because the gay news site, as a whole, is more popular than some of the blogs that belong in the category. This makes the page relatively useless for those looking for political news. Here is what I sent to Spotplex service:

Hello-

Just wondering how “gay news daily” is political. It seems like it might be a better fit for the culture category.
Also, your spotplex code only shows the image, I linked the image back to your homepage. Hopefully this will help you grow and gain traffic/blogs.

Thanks,
Brandon

This may be fixed in the future but, they have no intention to properly moderate categories now per this response from their customer service:

Brandon,

We appreciate it a lot. We should have put a link to image. Thanks for the tip.

By the way, which category a blog should belong to is something we can not decide by ourselves. We just let bloggers who write articles make that decision. Don’t ask me if I’m happy with their decision in this case, though.

If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to contact us.

Sincerely,

Spotplex Customer Support Team
support@spotplex.com

Before liberals, gay rights activists, etc get all worked up, I am only pointing this out because it is a weakness in their system. People looking for political news do not want to just read “gay news daily”, that is more appropriately placed in a culture or gay news category, not in the Politics category.

As someone who is interested in political coverage through the latest web 2.0 mediums, I have an interest in pointing out weaknesses in an otherwise strong and useful system. I hope the Spotplex is able to intervene with some degree of moderation merely to increase the functionality it’s site. I look forward to using it in the future.

In response to my challenge and that of commenter Theo North, the Sara and Dan MUSG ticket has released two more YouTube videos on their channel and facebook group.

“Talking about Dan and Sara” is a much more dynamic piece than their first foray into YouTube. It has a number of students and locations that reflect their message slightly better. “Communication” is a bit too slow and storybook for my liking but hey, I am not seeing it from anyone else yet. We’ll see if it helps them in the actual Marquette University student government primary election coming up on the March 21st. What I would really like to see is something like this example from Georgetown that Theo North commented on:

Joe and Teresa? Scott and Abe?

It seems Scott’s fans are most active in Gop3.com: The Forum though, as an advocate for Scott Seramur has been stating her cause and the Marquette University Student Government straw poll is currently going their way.

We have all seen how the YouTube campaign video trend can both make and break a campaign. The “macaca” incident with George Allen, whether fair or not, destroyed Fmr. Senator Allen’s presidential hopes. Conversely, Obama has made positive waves by announcing his campaign via web video.

Sara Stellpflug and Dan Guenther have taken this approach to the college campus level with a series of YouTube videos. This first attempt, a quick introductory clip is a start. I would hope that each candidate can put something like this together and I have encouraged their campaign to spice it up a bit with more issue oriented cuts at relevant locations across campus. I understand that at this stage of the game this is about just getting name recognition on campus but, hopefully we’ll see the candidates define themselves by what they are going to do and then execute on that image. Unfortunately, this has alway been a challenge for the Marquette University Student Government (MUSG). I will do my best to remain optimistic.

You can now once again Digg posts on this site. Digg has restored my account with this final description of how my account, and Gop3.com, got banned for instructing conservatives on the use of digg:

When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. This site has been repeatedly reported as spam. Digg does not take a political stance nor is politically biased. We do not ban sites for reasons involving political views. We do ban sites that are repeatedly reported, though, as is the case here.

So basically, Digger and his liberal friends who said they would get me banned did so by fraudulently marking my posts as spam. Digg also mentioned source variety in submissions is respected in the community which I very much agree with and do my best to provide. I appreciated the following closing from Digg support (verbatim):

Digg does, however, encourages its users to take part in the benefits of the Digg’s very diverse community through open discussion, debates, and posts, as long as they are not abusive.

Here is my final response:

Hello-

I understand that a number of liberals succeeded in getting me banned by falsely marking my posts as “spam”, they even stated so on my blog in the comments section. I understand how the Digg system works but, I would ask that you please be wary of liberals gaming the system by falsely reporting a site as spam in this way in the future. Thank you for your disclosure and reconsideration, I respect and appreciate the Digg community and look forward to participating fully for as long as possible.

Thank you for your time,
Brandon Henak

Digg on.

Last week in our PoliTech section, I took Gop3.com’s readers through the Digg.com signup process, encouraged them to list their user names in the comments so they could easily find other conservatives, and demonstrated how they could see what other conservatives were digging. Liberals predictably got upset that I was doing this. It was only meant to facilitate the spread of news and allow people to share stories they like with other like-minded people, a mission that runs parallel to Digg’s, or so I thought.

Evidently, I committed a crime so egregious that I have been banned from Digg for it. When I signed in roughly 25 minutes ago, I received this message:

This Account is Disabled
Your account has been disabled due to misuse.

I have heard of conservatives being banned before along with liberals burying conservative stories but, I am not one to leap to accusations of bias. I truly hope this is in error. I sent the following email to Digg today and I will share the response.

Here is the letter I sent:

Hello-

My Account has been erroneously closed. I tried to sign in and it stated that:
This Account is Disabled
Your account has been disabled due to misuse.

My account is: bhenak

I have not committed any abuse, I work hard to submit new prospectives on the news and share new with others, this is at the very core of the digg philosophy. How is this action even fair? I am not one to fly off kilter at an event like this and claim bias/prejudice but, how else am I suppose to take this?

Please restore my account.

Thank you for your time,
Brandon Henak

UPDATE: Digg has responded with the following email:

Your account was banned for violating digg Terms Of Use. It is targeted
as suspicious behavior which may involve the promotion of spam on Digg.
We’ll unban your account if you agree not to do this again.

For more info: http://digg.com/tos

–Digg Support

My response:

Hello-

Thank you for your quick response. Are conservative news and opinion posts now considered spam? None of the news items I have submitted even come close to the definition of spam in the Terms of Service. Please give me a specific example so I can avoid being banned again. I can’t promise not to do something that I do not have a description of. Please define exactly what I did wrong so I can avoid it in the future.

Thank you for your time,
Brandon Henak

I will post more as I receive it.

UPDATE II: See “Liberals Game Digg, Get Gop3.com Banned, Digg Restores Account“