We’ve had a really interesting week here at Show Me Progress.

Most of the traffic spike has subsided. Near as we can tell, the main post, ancillary posts, and our site entry URL combined for a traffic spike of 35,000 unique hits. That’s the equivalent of three to five months (depending on the time of year) of normal traffic. We’ve had traffic spikes in the past, just nothing like this

Log scale of selected posts (including site entry URL) at Show Me Progress.

The Associated Press story (incidentally, it was good reporting and well written) included our basic blog URL as text in the body of the story, so when news outlets across the country ran it they included that information in their cut and paste. A lot of people made their way to us in this fashion.

At one point we were approaching 2000 hits an hour. And, at times, in our real time observation, we had peaks of over fifty hits a minute.

We’ve already written about how we came to the story:

…Perry Beam, a musician from Higginsville, attended the rodeo at the Missouri State Fair with his spouse and an exchange student. He posted his account on Facebook. Bob Yates saw it and posted Perry’s account and photo on Show Me Progress and the Great Orange Satan (Daily KOS – without a photo at first). At that point I noticed a small traffic spike on our site statistics, driven by Great Orange Satan traffic seeking the photo, noted that it was Bob’s post, then promoted it to the front page….

….Other people saw stuff all over social media and then we were off to the races. I was called by the Associated Press, KSHB (the Kansas City NBC affiliate) and contacted by the Kansas City Star…

If Bob Yates had known initially how to post a photo on the Great Orange Satan and not cross posted here with the photo it is quite probable that the story would have dropped like a rock in their queue with minimal notice.

Social media certainly played a part. And continues to do so.

Jason Rosenbaum ‏@jrosenbaum

This quip from ShowMeProgress’ @MBersin makes me chuckle: “Anyone interested in some posts on campaign finance?” [….] 5:33 PM – 12 Aug 13

There’s a darker part of the social media aspect of this. The comment thread at the original Kansas City Star story by Yael Abouhalkah was not a paragon of wholesome goodness. Perry Beam’s Facebook page had a few comments along those lines, too. St. Louis City Treasurer Tishaura O. Jones endured jaw dropping vitriol directed at her on her Twitter account.

We had a few trolls stupid enough to downrate frontpager comments (there’s a waiting period to post comments or diaries – our trolls have short attention spans, they couldn’t wait). Dudes, we have keys to the store. It’s our blog. Your garbage gets removed and you get banned for life – sort of like a rodeo clown.

And no, banning here is not a First Amendment issue. It’s our blog. The First Amendment allows you to post on your own blog- and maybe other people will read it, or not.

We also received a handful of emails at our group blog address. We usually get so little email that the system ends up waiting a while to aggregate enough to forward to us. We generally don’t feed the trolls, but Blue Girl sometimes likes to practice her verbal evisceration techniques. It’s a terrible thing to watch, yet you can’t avert your eyes – it’s sort of like watching a hunter on the ice club a baby harp seal.

So, if you send us a sub-literate email we’ll either ignore it or post it on the blog and publicly mock you. That depends on anyone’s mood and if it’s a slow news day. It is August, you know.

That this story was covered and had reach is a good thing. Bringing it out in the open will have the eventual and ironic effect of pushing those attitudes out of the world of acceptable discourse at public venues. In time, with no fresh public to consume them, those attitudes will whither away in the dark.

Tony Messenger, at the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

FOUL: Is Missouri really better than the rodeo clown? Evidence says no

…But the rodeo clown knew the crowd at the Missouri State Fair would cheer the potential for a bull to trample a black man named Obama. Better than this? No. This is Missouri.

In time.

Previously:

At the Missouri State Fair last night (August 11, 2013)

Of state fair rodeo announcers and clowns: res ipsa loquitur (August 12, 2013)

You know you’ve struck a nerve… (August 12, 2013)

What happened in Sedalia didn’t stay in Sedalia (August 12, 2013)

We don’t get a lot of mail (August 13, 2013)

If heads rolling was a rodeo event… (August 13, 2013)

Seriously? (August 14, 2013)

We started at this blogtopia (y, sctp!) thing three years ago. And, yes, we’re still here.

A photo of candles and cake as an illustration of our celebration at reaching another milestone is becoming a tradition here at Show Me Progress corporate headquarters. Actually, it’s just an excuse to get the cake and eat it after the photo shoot – along with the ice cream thawing off camera.

We are officially one year old today. My hat’s off to my fellow frontpagers (especially hotflash) who continue to churn out good content every day. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

Last spring, hotflash and I started talking about switching from the blog she wrote at the time, which commented on national news, and shift to a community blog covering events in state politics. After bringing Blue Girl and Michael aboard, and a few bumps along the way, we posted this, this, and this on August 6th, 2008.

So what are we doing here? Everyone has their own reasons for blogging, but I laid my own out in my second diary, five days after we began. I have a lot of disagreements with Matt Stoller, but I still believe blogging and online activism offers a great opportunity along the lines of what says here:

Civic participation is a key tenet of how we built our media and political apparatus. We are demanding low barriers to entry in the political system, a way for everyone to participate, and more open cultural structures, including business, agriculture, and government.

You don’t have to pay to get in. There are no barriers to entry here – all you have to do is care. Anyone can write a diary or comment or read what others have to say about political developments in their own neck of the woods or across the state. Anyone can disagree, and back up their own observations with research. (Technical proficiency should not be a barrier. If you are having problems commenting or writing diaries, let me know at eric [AT] showmeprogress.com, and I’ll walk you through it.)

Never let people with smart mouths, bad attitudes, and political axes to grind near a union print shop. If you do so, they will inevitably gravitate toward creating a sarcastic bumper sticker. It’s got to be genetic.

The bumper sticker is 11 inches wide and 3 inches high. The background is actually white (okay, I’m not the world’s greatest photographer, so sue me).

Here’s the deal:

We printed 500 of these suckers (the photo really doesn’t do it justice, so sue me – I tell you, it “pops” live) at a union shop. Printing at a union shop is the only way to go. Are you paying attention Democratic Party candidates?

Since the Show Me Progress corporate headquarters has a staff of exactly zero we do not have the necessary infrastructure to fill requests that ask us to “please send me three”.

However, if you want to acquire 100 of these beauties for distribution as you see fit, we can talk. Contact us at: info@showmeprogress.com  If we get enough large orders we can order a really large printing (thereby driving the costs way down) and everybody will then be really happy. We won’t have distribution headaches, the meme achieves complete saturation, and a union print shop will be kept busy twenty four hours a day, seven days a week until early November.

Everybody will be happy. Except for actual republicans.

Now, don’t get upset with us because we can’t send you “just three”. We have a choice here. Write and post blog content, or fill bumper sticker orders one at a time. I think you’ll agree with the choice we made.

We plan on bringing the bumper stickers with us to the Missouri Democratic Party convention in Columbia on May 10th. Then again, if they’re all gone by then we’ll try to figure something out about getting more produced and distributed to the consumer masses.

A way to acquire a few of these beauties before May 10th is to actually see one of us before then.  Not so fast. Right now they’re sitting in one spot in the west central part of the state. We haven’t gotten a chunk of them to our folks in the eastern part of the state yet. Once we figure that out, we’ll let you all know.

We’ve made some tweaks to the blog since we’ve started, and we haven’t always done a good job at explaining them. So let me summarize a couple of older features we’ve received questions about, along with a new widget I added today. By the way, we’ve steadily added links to our blogroll. Do check them out from time to time. If you’re a blogger who’s feeling left out, let me know in comments, and we’ll see about adding you.

First up is the events calendar. We started off with a Google calendar linked in the banner at the top of the page, but for various reasons, that hasn’t worked out. Some months ago, I added the Soapblox-provided “Events Calendar” to the left sidebar. Originally I was worried about spam, so I restricted its use to regular commenters. A few weeks ago, I opened it up to use by any user of the site, as long as they are signed in. If you know about an event coming up and you want to spread the word, please do make use of it.

I also added a widget today, just below the calendar, called VoterStory ’08, that aggregates voter complaints from all over the country and alerts voter protection groups in the area. From their website:

The VoterStory web widget is programmed to collect and classify voter complaints in real time across the Internet and will provide a data feed of complaints that can be addressed in real time by Voter Protection groups who partner with VoterStory. Originally developed for the 2006 General Election, the VoterStory Web Widget is distributed web technology that enables a broad and expandable network to easily place sophisticated voter protection functionality on news, organizational web pages, blog and social media sites such as FaceBook or MySpace.

The VoterStory widget will be active on April 15, 2008. Complaints generated in the Pennsylvania Primary will be shared with election protection partners.

1 On Election Day, the voter completes the form with their story.

2 When they hit “submit” their information is transmitted to voter protection organizations who will be standing by to intervene or lend support if necessary.

3 The voter also receives an email confirming that their story was transmitted.

4 Voter information is entered into a database of election incidents.

5 Voter Protection groups receive live information about voting problems during the election.

Finally, a reminder about BlogAds. If you would like to advertise a candidate, cause, movie, restaurant, or whatever, and you want to reach an active and educated audience, head over to our BlogAds order page. Ads start at $15 per week, and we do give discounts for longer runs.