On January 25, 2003, Markos went out of town and left Daily Kos guest blogger Steve Soto in sole charge of the posting reins. Steve's first post that morning was So Much for Dismissing "Old Europe", written a few days before the SOTU, on Bush Administration and their push to commence hostilities against Iraq. Two comments signed MeteorBlades appeared that evening; the first reads in part:

Instead of the shrieking John Wayneism that we've endured from Bushboy since last April, he could have started by making his pretty good speech at the U.N., another at NATO, and even as a guest speaker at the Arab League. Instead, from the get-go, it's been the hollow clop-clop-clop of chest-pounding backed up by lies, lies, lies. Now, his cojones are at stake and he may not feel able to back down, even with most of the world, half the Pentagon and a good portion of the public against war under the current circumstances.

Go read the rest of it.

Were these truly the first comments written by MeteorBlades on Daily Kos? Yes. And no. This seeming contradiction will be explicated...over the flip.

Though the latest story by kos on the front page says you have five—now four—hours left to donate to Orange To Blue, this is not correct.

ActBlue servers run on Eastern Time. Therefore, every donation through ActBlue counts as if it was made in Eastern Time, regardless of where you happen to live.

Please, let your donation count for June 30. Make it before midnight Eastern. That's fewer than 60 minutes away! Thanks.

It's five days before the June 30 deadline—as email after phone call assures me, the last reportable deadline before active campaigning begins—and Democratic candidates everywhere are rushing to rope in a huge community of donors so they can report big numbers for Q2. Just since this morning, Al Gore pushed the DCCC,  John Edwards the DSCC (sorry, Al and John—no DCCC or DSCC support while there are FISA-voting blue-dog Dems on the list), Wes Clark wants me to use his ActBlue page to support Obama, seven house and two senate campaigns have emailed me directly, and I've been getting phone calls, too. (I don't ever give or promise money over the phone.) Snailmail is being recycled at an alarming rate.

All this may sound like I'm a scrooge or grinch. I'm not. I'm actually a pretty generous donor. I make a list and check it twice—those FISA aye votes are getting coal this month—get on ActBlue, and donate. No check-writing or filling out forms at each candidate's website: I donate with my credit card, several candidates per donation. It's wonderfully convenient, as you'll see if you jump now.

Early this morning, as the server computes, the billionth page view was provided by Daily Kos. To be a bit more precise, the server made this page available at 2:15:20am EDT, plus or minus a few seconds, if one is to believe sitemeter, the only reliable arbiter of such information.

It took six years and four weeks for Daily Kos to serve out the first billion pages. At the time I pulled the information from sitemeter showing that there had been one billion and twenty-four page views, it also said that the daily average was 975,088. Assuming that average stays constant, the second billion will take 1025.55 days to serve up, which would put that occurrence on the early afternoon of April 14, 2011. But, of course, the average won't stay constant. (It's already down from yesterday, thanks to that day's slow weekend activity.) Traffic will likely get busier as the election approaches, and after November 4, 2008—assuming the servers survive the extreme load that day—well, it's anyone's guess.

RonK, Seattle was the fourth guest blogger on Daily Kos, following Billmon and Steve Soto, who had first started on January 3, 2003, and Steve Gilliard on April 3, 2003. RonK joined the guest-blogging team a few days after Billmon's departure in early April; Steve Gilliard had an eight day head start on RonK, and had been posting daily.

Markos announced RonK's advent in Open Thread: 4/11:

I'll be out another few days ('till next Tuesday), as I have trips to LA and Vegas in the cards, as well as a visit from the inlaws to boot. Steve G. will keep up his excellent posting in my absence, joined by the sagacious RonK from Seattle. They should form quite the potent team.

RonK's would continue contributing to the front page while Daily Kos remained on Movable Type software, another six months. Join me on the flip with links to all 60 of his front-page posts here on Daily Kos, and to more of his writing.

In the evening of October 16, 2002, Markos posted N.Korea has nukes. Where's the saber-rattling?, referencing a blog post by Hesiod. The following afternoon, RonK, Seattle made his debut on Daily Kos, writing the ninth of fourteen comments to that post:

No intelligence failure here. Repeat: NO intelligence failure.

US intel knew about the weapons program. The shocker was North Korea's admission.

The BIG QUESTION: During the Iraq war powers debate, did anyone tell CONGRESS what US intel knew about the program?

Posted by RonK, Seattle at October 17, 2002 02:55 PM

In under six months, RonK would be invited to be the fourth Daily Kos guest blogger. More RonK comments and questions—big and otherwise—over the jump.

When the Top Comments diary fell into my lap today, I was already working on a diary on the Daily Kos prolific commenters—people who write a thousand or more comments in a single month.

So I was in a bit of a quandary, until I realized that we had a significant word in common: Comment. Top Comments is about the best comments and the commenters who write them, while Prolific Commenters takes note of those commenters who write with great frequency...and two diaries melded into one. A good thing, too, as Top Comments carries with it no ability to post twice in one day, nor to post a diary in a single block of unlimited length. Which means it's time for you to jump the flip...

(From the diaries, as I dab a tear from my eye. I still have the program from his lovely funeral services on my night table. I can't believe it's been a year... -- kos)

In an article James Wolcott wrote for the June Vanity Fair on battling bloggers, his section on Daily Kos and Markos included the following:

Apart from the late Steve Gilliard, a blogger whose untimely death left an unfillable void in the warrior class, few have set a healthier example of consuming concern trolls for breakfast than Markos. So the site that bears his name is not for the demure.

Steve died a year ago today, and that void still echoes.

In my Top Comments diary from two hours ago, Top Comments: Steve Gilliard on Daily Kos, part 5, I ran out of room.

I had every intention of providing links to all of Steve's front-page posts on Daily Kos—he wrote 220 of them between April 3 and August 28, 2003—and to all the comments he wrote before Markos tapped him to be a Daily Kos guest blogger. I wanted these to be available to the Daily Kos community, and the blogosphere at large, so the material was easily findable by anyone who wanted to remember Steve on the first anniversary of his death by reading his words, which are still very much alive.

The earlier diary has the links to Steve's posts, but all his comments from the very first on October 1, 2002 through March 11, 2003 as the Iraq invasion drew nearer needed to be made available. Hence this follow-on, outside the Top Comments rubric.

As I clicked on post after front-page post in my quest to obtain the links to all of Steve Gilliard's writing on Daily Kos in June and July of 2003, an inescapable conclusion began to form: although officially a guest blogger, Steve wrote with such frequency and consistency that he was effectively a co-blogger with Markos for two months that year, before he left to start his own blog.

I'd originally planned this to be the final installment covering Steve's blogging career on Daily Kos, but instead of a steady two months of fill-in posts, his output accelerated. In the nine weeks remaining before Steve started his own blog, he posted almost daily, missing only 7 of 63 days from June 5, 2003 through August 6, 2003. (Compare that to Markos, whose business trips and site upgrade server struggles had him missing 13 of those days.) In all, he wrote 151 posts in these nine weeks as compared to 183 for Markos, excluding open threads.

151 posts are far too many for a single diary to encompass. As it is, there isn't room to give the individual posts their due here; you'll have to do that yourself as you sample the links. The first half of this bounty is being presented today, and can be seen over the jump.

Markos Moulitsas Zúniga formally opened Daily Kos for business six years ago today, and in so doing, changed the world.

His goals were not quite that lofty, perhaps, as he penned his first post, Day 1, on May 26, 2002:

I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies. I believe government has an obligation to create an even playing field for all of this country's citizens and immigrants alike. I am not a socialist. I do not seek enforced equality. However, there has to be equality of opportunity, and the private sector, left to its own devices, will never achieve this goal.

Equality of opportunity was an excellent starting point, however, and the goals would grow to encompass the change needed to bring this about, and to elect those Democratic politicians who would dedicate themselves to bringing it about. There have been many successes along the way, and not a few failures. But the fight for opportunity, for transparency, for truth, for the constitution and the law, continues.

Happy Birthday, Daily Kos. We're celebrating all six world-changing years, over the flip.

With Daily Kos only six days away from celebrating its sixth birthday (that's the equivalent of about 99 years in Internet time), Top Comments is once again delving back into the days when Daily Kos was part of the blogging frontier, in the middle of a huge growth spurt and dealing with the resulting joys and pains of bloggy adolescence.

It seems a fitting way to help ramp up the festivities by showing people the way to the excellence Daily Kos was displaying in that first year, as the Iraq invasion moved past Mission Accomplished and into the on-the-ground reality that had been predicted on the blog for months: a never-to-be-successful mission.

One of the best Daily Kos writers on the war was Steve Gilliard, who had been named a guest blogger on April 3, 2003, due in part to his formidable knowledge and acute comments in this area. This diary links to Steve's front-page posts immediately after the first forty listed last time, and continues until June 6. Why June 6? Well, today is six days before the sixth anniversary—6/6—so it seemed as a good place to stop as any. When I was proceeding through every spring 2003 blog post to get the links to each of Steve's, the server suddenly refused to serve me any more posts when I tried moving on to June 7. I can take a hint. Can you?

On January 3, 2003, three months (and a few days) after Steve Soto first commented on Daily Kos, Markos made an announcement:

Introducing the first dKos guest contributors

Greetings everyone. Work and the Political State Report have been keeping me busy. So busy, in fact, that I have lined up two guest contributors to pick up my slack over the next two weeks.

Long time readers will recognize the guest contributors immediately: Billmon and Steve Soto, both of them comment board favorites. The two of them will essentially take over this site starting tomorrow (and may start posting as soon as today). I'll still post occassionally, but in effect this will be their site for the two-week period.

Try to be nice.

Update: Posts written by either Billmon of Steve will be signed by their respective authors. If you see a post with no signature, it's still me.

Posted January 03, 2003 09:28 AM

Yes, it should have been "Billmon or Steve" in the update, but typos happen. So do jumps. One right about...now!

It was the last day in September, 2002, and Yahoo News was reporting that embattled New Jersey Senator Robert Toricelli would announce his decision that afternoon on whether he'd withdraw his candidacy for re-election a mere 36 days from then on November 5th. This was big news, and Steve Soto made his first appearance right after a commenter named Zak suggested Bill Bradley as a replacement :

Zak stole my thunder. Why not Bradley? It's not like he's going to run for President again, right? And he would be a cinch compared against Forrester. With Clinton out of the White House and McCain/Feingold addressing some of the unpleasantness he found in politics, he may be induced to come back for a term or two. He's still young, and can be a player once again.

Posted by Steve Soto at September 30, 2002 01:07 PM

As it turned out, we ended up with a different former Democratic senator, Frank Lautenberg—the following comment was Markos reporting that Bradley had "emphatically refused to be considered". But we also ended up with Steve Soto: a win/win situation. Steve's many 2002 comments are all linked to over the jump.

On January 3, 2003, nearly two months after billmon first commented on Daily Kos, Markos made an announcement:

Introducing the first dKos guest contributors

Greetings everyone. Work and the Political State Report have been keeping me busy. So busy, in fact, that I have lined up two guest contributors to pick up my slack over the next two weeks.

Long time readers will recognize the guest contributors immediately: Billmon and Steve Soto, both of them comment board favorites. The two of them will essentially take over this site starting tomorrow (and may start posting as soon as today). I'll still post occassionally, but in effect this will be their site for the two-week period.

Try to be nice.

Update: Posts written by either Billmon of Steve will be signed by their respective authors. If you see a post with no signature, it's still me.

Posted January 03, 2003 09:28 AM

Yes, it should have been "Billmon or Steve" in the update, but typos happen. So do jumps. One right about...now!

We have so many insightful and powerful diaries written here at Daily Kos.  Our diaries inform, inflame, impassion, and even entertain.  We Kossacks have strong voices and an even stronger will to be the change we wish to see in this country.

One of the richest, and perhaps most under-appreciated, areas of thought come in the form of comments attached to these diaries.

Here at Top Comments we strive to recognize and promote the talent of this community by highlighting outstanding comments found throughout the day by the diarist, and through nominations at made at TopComments at gmail dot com by your fellow Kossacks.

These nominations are subjective, and certainly not complete (as no one can read the complete site on a daily basis!). But we hope they will serve to shine a light where deserved, and to give the reader a good starting point in finding conversation on the site.

Please come in and make yourself at home!  Join us beneath the fold...

It was Election Day 2002, in a mid-afternoon Daily Kos front-page post Early numbers, that billmon made his first appearance:

We know (or at least can reasonably assume) three things:

1. The Republicans are bad mouthing the exit polls, according to Rich Lowry.

2. The networks, which saw the GOP gaining in the final days, are bad mouthing the exit polls, according to Josh Marshall.

3. Said exit polls APPEAR to be showing surprising Dem strength.

So either the exit polls really are screwed up (always a possibility) or this election isn't going according to the Media Whores' script, and the Dems are in for a good, maybe a very good night.

Like the journalistic hacks say: It remains to be seen.

Posted by billmon at November 5, 2002 02:21 PM

As it turned out, the exit polls really were screwed up. But Billmon wasn't, as evidenced by his many 2002 comments, all of which are linked to over the jump.

This is the second part of a Top Comments diary on the Daily Kos writings of Steve Gilliard, one of the original group of guest posters on this blog, who died last June. Part 1 was published on Wednesday, and featured Steve's comments in the three weeks before he debuted on the front page. That time period, March 12, 2003 through April 2, 2003, started one week before the invasion of Iraq, five years ago this week.

Steve's absence is still keenly felt. So far this year he's been mentioned in four DKos front-page stories, including one this past Tuesday by kos, fourteen user diaries, and over eighty comments, excluding those prompted by Wednesday's diary. His name has been used to tag a post on Daily Kos 77 times—make that 78.

Steve Gilliard's first guest blog post was almost five years ago, on April 3, 2003. I won't be able to post on the five-year anniversary of that date, so with that day under two weeks away, I ask you to join me on the flip with a vast array of links to his work here on Daily Kos.