I caught a little bit of Billy Dennis’ online talk radio show Sunday. It was very interesting. Billy’s guest was John Bambenek of the Illinois Citizens Coalition and the topic was whether Illinois voters should approve a Constitutional Convention (or “con-con”) to rewrite Illinois’ constitution.
I heard about the last half hour, and plan to listen to the first half the first chance I get. I encourage you take a listen.
I was wondering myself if Schock really had to be in Springfield and miss the foreign policy debate, or if he was just using that as a way to chicken out. Billy has the answer.
I’ve been noticing lately that Billy Dennis has really stepped up his citizen journalism. He’s always been the “blogfather,” of course, but I’ve noticed an increase in his first-hand reporting lately. He’s doing an especially good job of covering the 18th congressional district race.
I frankly can’t keep up with him anymore. If he keeps this up, I may give up my blog and just occasionally post guest commentary on his site. 🙂
Billy beat me to publishing this story about Gary Sandberg since he has all day to blog (he works at night). This is the issue about which Emtronics wrote the other day.
While Emtronics thought the story was about Gary not paying his property taxes, it’s actually a dispute over an alleged code violation from 2004 and a fine of $110.
It’s estimated that we see 3,000-5,000 mass marketing messages every day. Doing his part to help us get our daily quota, Billy Dennis has inaugurated a new ad-heavy theme:
When I first pulled up Billy’s new WordPress theme, my first thought was, “what happened to the content?” It used to be that advertisements and content were, for the most part, separate. Content was in one column and advertisements were in another. With the new theme, advertisements are in all columns. They’re so prevalent, I can’t even see the content without scrolling down a full page. Billy tells me this is because my screen is too small, not because his ads are too big.
One wonders what the next step will be. When we click on a permalink, will we have to look at an ad before we can continue to the post? Will all posts have product placement (e.g., “While I was drinking a Diet Pepsi, I was thinking about Peoria’s budget process…”)? Will he start putting Flash audio ads on his site so we have to hear the ads as well as see them? At what point will the Peoria Pundit reach marketing saturation?
Of course, many of my hits are from Pundit referrals, so in closing, I’d just like to say, please read the Peoria Pundit, and be sure to support the advertisers who make that site possible. 😛
Billy Dennis is having some trouble with his site and wanted me to pass along this information:
You may or may not be noticing some sort of ad page on the front of Peoria Pundit. It should NOT be there. I’m in contact with my hosting company to find out what’s wrong, and fix it. I’m suspecting a domain renewal snafu, which is odd, since I haven’t been notified in any way, shape or form. I’d almost rather have my site highjacked.
Tell your readers this may not be resolved until tomorrow.
Thanks.
I was able to get his site, so thought he had it fixed, but I’ve heard from others that they’re still getting hotel ads or something instead of his site.
Good luck this morning on getting everything worked out, Billy!
UPDATE: Billy’s site should be back up within 24 hours. Here’s his latest note:
It turned out that my old domain registrar was bought out by these new guys, and they were sending renewal notices to an old, old old email address, even though I had long ago switched my contact info to an address I can still use. They were very apologetic and helpful. It took the young lady on the phone about five minutes to renew my domain over the phone with a credit card. It will take up to 24 hours for everyone’s ISPs to start pointing ” peoriapundit.com” back to MY site, rather than their ugly little place holder.
And I now see the wisdom in hiring young women to do tech support. I was going to unload a barrage on venom on whoever answered the phone, but I didn’t have the heart to make this squeeky-voiced teenager feel bad.
UPDATE 2: Billy’s site is back up now. Welcome back, Billy!
Civility is all the rage these days.
First Billy Dennis over at the newly-christened “Peoria Pundits” had to institute a civility policy (twice) because of escalating flame wars not only in the comments sections, but in the posts themselves. It was like “Lord of the Flies” for a while there.
Now, I see over at the Bloomington Pantagraph that they’ve had to do the same thing, except they may be a bit more aggressive than Billy:
So, beginning today, our screeners will not allow users to be rude, take pot shots at others or call names in comments posted on our site. Hopefully, this will change the tone of the conversation and keep people focused on a discussion of the issues and not calling each other “idiots” because they have misspelled a word or two.
They can afford to be more aggressive — they have screeners. They’ve gotten over 230 comments to their plea for civility saying polite and courteous things like, “Pantagraph, thank you so much for protecting my fragile emotions.” And, “Your [sic] just going to to take the fun out of the comments, that’s all. Guess I will head back to cnn.com….” See how well their new policy is working?
So far, I’ve only had a couple of instances where I had to ask commenters on The Peoria Chronicle to be civil (knock on wood). They’ve always complied; furthermore, most of my readers have been civil without having to be told, and for that, I thank you. I hope I never have to institute a civility policy, but I suppose it’s inevitable.
We’ll just enjoy our little utopia while we can.
I got this e-mail from Billy Dennis this morning:
Please leave a message on your blog saying that I am alive, but my hosting company has taken a dump on customer service. They have a known issue with a program they use that it essentially preventing my site from loading in [Firefox] and also preventing it from working well in Internet Explorer.
They’ve informed me that there is nothing they can do. I’m spending all day on NEW YEARS DAY trying to get presale questions answered so I can move my site, which will take at least another two days once I find a place that won’t quit on me when I have issues.
I’ve experienced trouble with Billy’s site lately myself. I can’t get to any of his permalinks using Firefox (my browser of choice), and when I tried to leave a comment using Internet Explorer, it never went through. If these are the “known issues” that his current hosting company (A Small Orange) is unwilling to fix, then obviously it’s time for the Pundit to head to another hosting company.
The comment I tried to leave Billy said that my hosting company is BlueHost, and I recommend them. I’ve been with them for a year and will be renewing for another year this month. They’ve always been responsive to any service issues I’ve had. In fact, one of the things I like is that I always get a human voice when I call, not dreaded voice-recognition menus. I’ve only had two outages in the past year, and both times my site was back up within two hours.
Good luck, Billy. And I hope you get some time away from your hosting problems to enjoy New Year’s Day. Happy new year!
Tonight, Jonathan Ahl looks at blogging and its effect on public policy on “At Issue.” (Jonathan is filling in for H. Wayne Wilson, who is on sabbatical.) His guests: Billy Dennis of the Peoria Pundit and yours truly of the Peoria Chronicle. It’s on WTVP tonight at 8:30 and will replay on Sunday, September 10, at 4:30 p.m.
I was reading the Peoria Pundit this morning and saw what search results come up when you look up “Gary Sandberg,” so I thought I would look up “Bill Dennis” and see what hits I got. I knew he had been looking for ways to make his blog profitable, but I didn’t realize to what extent he had gone. Take a look at this MSN Search.