Sorry, I realize I may sound confusing because I am a long term user who looks at the site this way: first Josh Marshall created a "TPMCafe" supposedly for posting and discussion of wonk stuff and history stuff and culture stuff that he wasn't presenting on his regular blog, as a sort alternative to the latter, which was more on breaking political topics of the day. The Cafe was for "other things."

And he included on the Cafe a place for users to post diary entries or blogs as well as a place for long term "discussion tables" of various topics. Then he started hiring people and developing more subsites (Election Central, Muckraker, etc.)

Then he got new software and decided that the discussion tables should be 86'd and that the Reader Blogs should go across the whole site and be promoted as such, not just part of the Cafe.

When he did the latter, the big audiences at Election Central, only interested in American politics and not coming here for anything else, took over the Reader Blogs, and many of them accessed it directly from there and never even knew there was a site called "TPMCafe." And they would even sometimes yell at people who wanted to post on something else besides the election, beyond pushing alternate stuff into oblivion by virtue of the Recommend system and quick churn of the big audience.

My two cents opinion: from that happening, lots of people got the idea that all the sites on this address should be about American political news only. Knowing what I know about its start, I don't think it was intended that way originally for TPMCafe (examples: Josh would post on things like HBO's Rome, and editor Kate Cambor would post on European topics, and there would be guests on things like the Danish cartoon controversy and Islam.) I don't know if it still is, and I admit I have no idea what the policy or intent is here now, but I do often sense the rule here is "let the audience decide by itself." And majority rules then.

And that takes us back to the topic of this book--the whole viral thing, the vote of vox populi as to what gets attention and what gets covered, how the popular topic of the day gets decided by internet mob, and how the future media may allocate resources according to that.

A cavaet: I don't want to give across the message that the early TPMCafe was a success at getting people to post on other things apart from vox populi "hot topic of the day." It wasn't. For example, I recall that when Cheney had his hunting accident, everyone posted their two cents on that and pushed everything else off, pages and pages of everyone's two cents on the story, for several days. And when Katrina hit, that's all that people wanted to talk about here, and nothing else, it was as if the rest of world had disappeared, and there was only New Orleans, pages and pages of it--and the management obliged the audience further by getting New Orleans related correspondents and setting up a special section for them.

So there weren't really any "good old days" here when variety was the rule. But there were days when most people did take this as a place where non-political topics of discussion, topics not even much related to news (examples: atheism, history, science, philosophy topics,) were very welcome, and promoted by staff, and welcomed by readers, and I think now that's not so much in evidence. It is pretty much considered oddball now to see a post like that. While something like social networking goes on here, it all seems to be for political ends in a way, getting like-minded people to become friendly and possibly do something political in the future, and not so much like a book club, where the idea is discussion/learning/intellectual discourse and stimulation pure and simple, without political intent.