It’s that time again. the Eugene Weekly has opened the polls for its annual Best of Eugene survey. If you’re a fan of the Commentator, feel free to vote for us as best local blog. Even if you’re not a fan, surely you could still appreciate how much it would piss all the whiny hippies off. Think about the whiny hippies, won’t you?

Also, vote for Rennie’s Landing as best bar and one of Ninkasi’s fine creations for best beer.

I just got an email informing me that the Oregon Commentator has once again been chosen as one of ten finalists in the America’s Future Foundation College Blogger Contest. Last year we had the pleasure of being chosen as a finalist, and we took second place. The official list of finalists hasn’t been announced yet, but the judges this year are:

• Jonah Goldberg of the Corner
• Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy
• Radley Balko of The Agitator
• Robert Bluey of RobertBluey.com
• Megan McArdle of Asymmetrical Information at TheAtlantic.com
• Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit
• Jennifer Rubin of Commentary’s Contentions

which is pretty freakin’ awesome.

On an aside, I’m reminded of when we first found out we were in the contest last year. Someone asked, “What do you think our odds of actually winning are?” to which then Managing Editor Jake Speicher deadpanned, “I’d say about one in 10.”

The OC Archive has been updated with links to all issues published so far for Volume XXVI and the previously unlinked issues for Volume XXV. Enjoy.

The OC Archives for Volumes 16 and 17 have been updated. Old HTML versions of issues that are not presently available in .pdf have been linked in from the darkwing server. Enjoy!

There’s a fairly hilarious kerfuffle going on right now between two Oregon bloggers, Jack Bog and “Oregon Reality.” Mr. Bog became so outraged by the other blogger’s attacks on him that he “outed” the anonymous blogger, revealing his true identity for all to see. (As we all know, that is the ultimate disgrace for anonymous bloggers, much like masked luchadores). And it was none other than … Troutdale City Councilor Rob Canfield.

Normally I wouldn’t be writing about such an Internet wank-fest, but I happened to notice this little tidbit in Jack Bog’s post:

Canfield also posts on other internet sites as himself, as “Oregon Reality,” and apparently as “wob” or “wobboh,” using a Verizon account.

Could it be? Is Canfield the same “wubba wubba” who instigated one of the most ridiculous comment threads in Oregon Commentator history? For shame, Troutdale. For shame.

So I’m now the Blog Editor of CAMPUS Magazine Online, the online publication of the Collegiate Network. I’ll be writing over there mostly about higher education. I’ll crosspost some of the articles here, but if you’re interested, check out the real deal.

In other news, OC alum and current Zamboni operator Jake Speicher has a personal blog with a long name, and it’s pretty good.

Well, sort of. The Oregon Commentator is listed as a suggested conservative blog on John McCain’s website. It’s kind of cool to be listed alongside some of the big names like Volokh Conspiracy. A few of our friends from the AFF blog contest are also listed, as well as local Oregon blog NW Republican.

Of course, this all comes with a catch. From the website:

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

What’s the current exchange rate for McCain Points? Can I also win McCain Points by playing skeeball? How many do I need to get a secret decoder ring?

Here are the top ten Oregon Commentator bloggers as far as number of posts.

1. Timothy Dreier – 476
2. Olly   – 375
3. Sho   – 272
4. Ian Spencer  – 260
5. Ted   – 154
6. Bret Jacobson  – 126
7. Pete   – 115
8. Ossie Bladine  – 108
9. Danimal   – 100
10. CJ Ciaramella  – 93

A notable author name on the list is Skeletor Ogboggle – username ‘other,’ – with 8 posts, my favorite of which is: OC In Depth: The Emerald After-Party

The official announcement went out today that Joe Malchow of Dartblog took first place in the America’s Future Foundation College Blogger Contest 2008 and will receive the $10,000 prize. The Oregon Commentator blog was runner-up, which would be somewhat anticlimactic except that one of the judges has decided to give us a $1,000 second place prize out of his pocket. Third place went to Surveillance State.

David Kirby of the AFF told me it was a close race and that we received a few first place votes. Going into the competition, we understood Malchov and company were heavy favorites; the fact we gave those Ivy League guys a run for their money calls for a big West Coast cheers.

“I’m so pleased that AFF has had the opportunity to shine a light on so many of the talented writers and journalists who are up-and-comers in the fight for liberty,” Kirby said. “We’re looking forward to building on this year’s success to turn the AFF College Blogger Contest into a consistent leader in encouraging freedom-minded writers to speak up on campuses across the country.”

Thank you AFF for hosting this competition and to all the judges, and a special thanks to the fine gentleman who created the now award-winning OC blog, Mr. Bret Jacobson, Mr. Oliver Ruff, Mr. Pete Hunt, Mr. Sho Ikeda and Mr. William Beutler, and to everyone else who has contributed to the Oregon Commentator for the past twenty four and a half years.

The Commentator is a tradition like no other and it’s a pleasure to continue advocating for conservatism, free thought and individual liberty at the University of Oregon.

The Oregon Commentator has been selected as one of the ten finalists in the America’s Future Foundation 2008 College Blogger Contest. Here’s part of the sweet email we got:

Dear college blogger,

Thanks for entering the America’s Future Foundation College Blogger Contest. I’m happy to let you know that you’ve been chosen as one of ten finalists. You are now eligible to compete for the $10,000 grand prize. Contest judges will now regularly monitor your blog through April at which point they’ll announce a winner.

Not bad for a bunch of boozehounds, eh? Here’s the full list of finalists:

• GOP3.com (Marquette University)
• The Oregon Commentator (University of Oregon)
• California Patriot Blog (Univeristy of California, Berkeley)
• The Irish Rover (University of Notre Dame)
• The Critical Badger (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• The Claremont Conservative (Claremont McKenna College)
• Panther Talk Live (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee)
• Dartblog (Dartmouth College)
• Surveillance State (Indiana University Bloomington)
• On Life and Lybberty (Brigham Young University & University College London)

The contest will be judged by a group of noted bloggers who you’ve probably ran across if you’re conservative or libertarian and spend any time at all on the internet. Most of them are on our blogroll on the right side of the page, but in the interest of completeness:

• Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy
• Radley Balko of The Agitator
• Robert Bluey of The Heritage Foundation and RobertBluey.com
• Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online
• Mary Katharine Ham of TownHall.com
• Megan McArdle of Asymmetrical Information at TheAtlantic.com
• Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit

Congrats to the other finalists, and thanks to the America’s Future Foundation for putting on the contest. We’ve made some basic plans about what we’ll do with the money if we win, but all I can say at the moment is that it will probably be the kind of event that divides history (i.e. pre and post-“that time the Commentator won 10k”). All fiscal conservatives will be invited.

Last year’s archive of back issues has finally been updated. Enjoy.

Back before the word “blog” was a buzzword thrown about by political campaigns, advertising executives, and talking heads (okay, maybe it was already a buzzword), the Oregon Commentator decided to take a break from reading the Onion and searching for pictures of Brooke Burke to give blogging a shot.  Now that WordPress and Blogger play nice (sort of), the OC blog posts pre-dating April 2004 are now online.  There are still a few kinks to fix, and certainly many of the links leading to stuff on the blog and elsewhere are broken, but all-in-all it is complete.  Enjoy the ramblings of Hunt, Jacobson, Dreier, Ruff, Atkinson and company.

Ever wonder how far you can coast on charm? Well, according to blognetnews.com and their patented “Oregon Influence Index”, the OC is the 11th most influential political blog in Oregon. I think that calls for a golf clap! The left-leaning Loaded Orygun (bad name, better content) took top honors.

Of course, you may wonder how one manages to quantify an abstract quality like “influence.” I have no clue, and the folks at blognetnews.com aren’t spilling the beans. As they explain on their site, “The exact method BNN uses to calculate influence scores must remain proprietary in order to prevent attempts to game the system.” Damn, now I’ll never be able to hack my Bill Bradbury fanfic blog to the top of the list!

UPDATE: We’re up to 9th on the chart now – a change of two places in a little over an hour. Hmm, maybe the BNN’s methods for determining influence has something to do with how many times you link to them.

Well, I was looking at our website stats and we’re still doing pretty well, roughly 10,000 unique visitors per month, and reasonable numbers of hits. The not so good news is that about 25% of the total bandwidth was being eaten by Yahoo’s search robot. I’ve added a robots.txt file to the public_html directory and disallowed that robot indexing any file that might be kind of large (.pdfs and common web graphics files). Let me know if this does anything wonky.

Also, we continue to get searches for fake cocks and Rebecca Newell vagina. We know less about the latter than we might like, to be honest.

Akismet seems to be overly aggressive recently, I’ve gone through the queue and restored a dozen or so comments. If you post something that doesn’t show up immediately, please let me know. That is all, thanks.