Open Left Opens Up Shop

Two of my favorite bloggers/activists--Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, both formerly of MyDD--have officially launched their new community blog--Open Left--along with Mike Lux, whom I've never heard of before. Matt Stoller explains the name:

Why Open Left? Why not just netroots?

Good question. We've never been comfortable with the term 'netroots'. It's a term without a coherent meaning, sometimes pointing to liberals that organize in online communities, sometimes meaning anyone online who does so. This term doesn't describe who we are, because there is no divide between online and offline at this point; insiders use email and blogs, and outsider activists run campaigns and have in-person conferences. The term 'Open Left' is a much wider and more descriptive way of understanding the larger political dynamics at play. It is not the use of the internet that matters, it is the expression of traditional left-wing American principles on open systems that is the institutional innovation at work here.

This has been a long time coming. The internet itself expresses certain values that go back to very early American philosophers, and its communal and networked structure combined with its rampant capacity for individualism is uniquely situated for our moment in history. The third important left wing movement in modern American history is nearly ten years old, it's time we recognize what's going on.

Thus, OpenLeft.com.

I'll be very interested to see how this effects MyDD and its readership. One thing that I've been thinking about a lot over the past few years, and espescially since Mike and Co. left Music for America, is that we have to look at staffing of progressive institutions that are a part of, or provide services to, the movement in a new way. This movement has arisen partly because of the political climate, and partly because of the rise of networked technology. And since the network is really a mixture of connections between people and through technologies, the network (or movement) might "abandon" an organization or site when the person (in network terms, the connecting node) who was connecting that org or site to the broader movement leaves. In this case I believe that Jerome Armstrong and MyDD are entrenched enough within the movement that this may not have much effect at all on MyDD's readership. I guess we'll see.

Update: Well it didn't take long for things to get a bit testy. Check out Jerome's response to Open Left forgetting to put MyDD on its blogroll. Jerome is also tiring of all of this "movement" talk and doesn't seem too happy with the choice of Clintonite Lux. Hmm... This could get interesting...