Please consider making a contribution to AMERICAblog

It's that time again, our once-a-month AMERICAblog-athon where we ask you to consider making a not-tax-deductible contribution to the blog, using the yellow boxes at the top of the screen.

For any of you who are relatively new to the blog, this is a full-time job for me. I gave up 99% of my political consulting work to do the blog full-time starting this past February (during the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert White House journalist/prostitute story). Since that time, I've relied almost wholly on your donations to pay my salary, and to pay for the upkeep of the blog.

There's good news, in that regard. My goal is to eventually make the blog self-sufficient - in the future, I want the ads to pay 100% for the maintenance of the blog (tech costs, monthly bandwidth, salary, etc.). At that point, I want to only seek contributions for specific advocacy projects, such as raising money for candidates, for specific causes, for an ad campaign, i.e., for some specific "I gotcha" moment we want to take advantage of immediately and for which we need a few bucks to do it. I.e., we could pay an organizer to raise some hell, send Kyle on more trips to trouble spots (wouldn't it be cool to send someone to cover Camp Casey?). I also think it would be cool to consider doing some kind of "up and coming blogger" scholarships - i.e., raising some cash to help smaller bloggers (who already kick ass) for whom a couple hundred or a couple thousands bucks could make a world of difference in the work they do. These are all just in the planning stage, but that's the kind of cool stuff we can do when we become totally self-sufficent via the ads.

As for now, there are the technical costs of running a big blog. As many of you know, we're in the process of moving to our own dedicated server. We've pretty much grown too large for the Blogger system we now use (it's free) - we're getting a lot of traffic, have incredibly large archives, and Blogger is extremely limiting in the functionality it offers, though it's a great system and I'd recommend it for new bloggers.

Anyway, we need to move to our own dedicated server, which will also entail redesigning the entire architecture of the blog. That's pretty cool, because AMERICAblog 2.0 will have a lot more functionality for us, and you, to do lots of cool things. Moving the blog over to our own server, redesigning it, creating the blogging software that will run the site, having a part-time tech guy on staff to keep things up and running, and hosting it for the first 12 months will cost around $34,000. (And please, don't send me emails telling me this cost estimate is too high, you have no idea what our bandwidth usage is - we used several hundred gigs in just the few weeks we posted those "dead Iraqis for war porn" photos.) I've already raised over half the money to help meet that cost and am hopeful over the next year we can raise the rest.

Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying "this is why I ask for your contributions."

As I've said before, if you'd consider buying a subscription to a print magazine or newspaper, or if you'd consider making a donation to your favorite advocacy group, then consider treating AMERICAblog the same way. We're part newspaper, magazine, advocacy group, and therapy all wrapped up in one.

Here's to bigger and better things in the year ahead :-)

JOHN