Award Winning Blog - Agitator

Campaign Ads To Be Ashamed Of

We're now a week away from the long-awaited mid-term elections. Conventional wisdom runs deep that the GOP will post big losses and the Dems will gain. Meanwhile, the remaing days of the campaign countdown will find millions of television -watching voters exposed every 10 or 15 minutes to a barrage of campaign spots. The New […]

Learn More October 31, 2006

Into the Darkness: An Editor’s Plea

Each day five or six of us read dozens of news items, a half dozen polls and research studies and try our best to put together the 'editorial budget' for The Agitator. Noble, sure. Effective, I'm not so sure. Why? Each week hundreds of regular, repeat readers visit this site. You are folks who clearly […]

Learn More October 30, 2006

You Can Win $1,000, Maybe Even $100,000

No, not by completing our Staying Ahead of the Curve survey (see right column, top). For that, you simply earn our gratitude and some insight into how your peers are doing when Agitator reports the results. For $1,000 or $100,000 in prize money, you need to win Carson Daly's (originator of MTV's “TRL” phenom) “It's […]

Learn More October 29, 2006

We’re Flabbergasted

This post in Don't Tell The Donor really surprises us, since we generally find this guy quite insightful … hence his inclusion on our blogroll. Basically the post calls “total rubbish” the following comment by a writer for a local business publication: Today, nonprofits need to operate like a business. Budgeting funds is a must, […]

Learn More October 28, 2006

Email Heresy

Recently we blank”>posted on the thorny subject of whether email lobbying campaigns were actually getting their messages through to Congress. The focus of the posting was on the technical side of whether (or to what extent) such “generated” messages were filtered out in various ways by legislators' defensive systems. In addition, however, The Agitator expressed […]

Learn More October 27, 2006

Give Vilfredo Pareto More Respect

In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto made the observation that 80% of the property in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. With further embellishment, this morphed into the Pareto Principle, or 80/20 rule, which posits that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. It's also called the law of […]

Learn More October 26, 2006