A new group blog with a who's who listing of academic, political and cultural posters has just launched – PoliticalMavens.com. As American politics heats up for the Fall races, and with the continuing problems with Iran and Hezbollah, this should be a blog to watch. Check it out.
UPDATE: PoliticalMavens.com got so many hits – in the hundreds of thousands, it seems – that the server crashed. It is being switched to a larger server, and should be up and running by 4:45 pm EDT.
A word to TypePad: This could have been a TypePad blog. I was asked months ago by the team behind PM and I responded honestly about TypePad's technical problems and then-lack of honesty and responsiveness in solving them. Even with today's server glitch, no one consulted by the PM team thinks the decision not to go with TypePad was poor.
Last week, my calls to TypePad regarding heavily degraded service were ignored and the online support system failed miserably yet again. The issue was largely repaired after several days, but no response from TypePad ever came. Who was contacted at TypePad? The director of customer service.
Worse yet, TypePad's status blog did not mention the problems, because, it seems, these problems only affected larger blogs with many posts and comments.
A TypePad logo on the PM homepage is worth tens of thousands of dollars. TypePad lost that because of poor customer service and communication.