Another MSM Piece On Blogs: Still Think They Are Insignificant?

[Annie]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2006/04/23/blogger_heads/

Blogger heads
Conservative twins find niche

By Lisa Wangsness, Globe Staff | April 23, 2006

The Margolis twins are blogging to you from an undisclosed location, somewhere on the North Shore. They would like to be more specific about the home base of their conservative political blog, hubpolitics.com, but they are a bit rattled these days.


Not long ago, Aaron Margolis posted a seemingly sensible proposal that, in light of the recent slaying of Imette St. Guillen, and the indictment of a bouncer at the bar where the Boston-born graduate student was last seen alive, bar owners be required to run background checks on security guards. The torrent of obscene replies they received included a violent threat and an unpleasant hint: ''You. . . are being surveyed."

The 26-year-old twins are nearly identical: dark hair, wide girth, firmly conservative. Their cellphone numbers differ by one digit. Matt has a small beard so that people can tell them apart.

They love to be provocative; they sometimes worry about whom they've provoked.

They spend most of their days huddled over building plans at architectural firms (both are taking a semester off from their graduate studies in the field).

But on their lunch breaks and late into the night, they can be found toiling alongside empty Starbucks coffee cups, scarfing up the day's news and hurling commentary back into cyberspace via their blog.

Their goal, as the campaign season heats up, is to make hubpolitics.com the online home for conservatives in one of the country's bluest states. Since its inauguration July 4, hubpolitics.com has drawn as many as 2,000 hits a day, by its own count, making it one of the state's most-read conservative websites.

''Hopefully, Hub Politics will be a place they can go to and people will be able to say, 'Hey, there are Republicans out there,' " Matt Margolis said.

The blog has already turned heads. Earlier this month, when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick unfurled his new multimedia blog with great fanfare, Aaron Margolis quickly discovered that a video testimonial from ''Amy G. from Wellesley," was from Amy Gorin, Patrick's campaign co-chairwoman. The Patrick campaign looked sheepish, and Aaron Margolis waxed triumphant.

''At least be open and honest about who she is," he wrote.

The twins' blogging credentials go back to 2002, when most people had never heard of Web logs. Matt Margolis started a blog that included lots of political discussion; his brother followed into the blogosphere about a year later with the Pardon My English blog.

While hubpolitics.com largely sticks to political issues concerning Massachusetts, pardonmyenglish.com strays far afield, recently touching on immigration, the Duke University lacrosse team rape case, and the war on terror.

It often includes vicious language, such as Aaron Margolis's description of illegal immigrants as ''illegal leeches" in an April 12 posting.

Aaron Margolis said he uses that kind of language to convey passion, and engage his audience. ''Particularly with the medium we use, that's the kind of language people respond to most," he said. ''It helps generate discussion."

Matt Margolis hit it big in November 2003, when blogs burst onto the national campaign scene on the wave of buzz propelling Howard Dean's blog-savvy presidential campaign.

He started Blogs For Bush, which featured a roundup of pro-Bush blogs from across the country and attracted national attention, earning him press credentials to the 2004 Republican National Committee in New York.

He still runs that site, as well as gopbloggers.org, mattmargolis.com, and noagenda.org, a website that ''tracks and monitors corruption in the Democratic Party."

Hubpolitics.com is the twins' first joint effort. They offer analysis on whatever bit of news fires them up -- from Mayor Thomas M. Menino's ''so-called achievements" in cutting crime to Attorney General Tom Reilly's demand for restitution from Big Dig contractors (''a $108 million joke") to Chris Gabrieli's gas-guzzling campaign vehicle (''Democratic hypocrisy at its best").

They do not consider Hub Politics a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. Recently, the site chided gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey for holding too many big-money fund-raisers at posh hotels in the middle of the workday.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.