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Daily Kos is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and progressives. It is arguably the most influential liberal weblog.
Daily Kos is run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a young U.S. Army veteran, as part of his political consulting firm. It has daily traffic of 450,000 or more, and often reaches over 2,500,000 unique visits in one week. Daily Kos readers gave approximately $500,000 in user donations to Democratic candidates in the 2004 elections. All of these candidates lost, but in many cases their opponents were forced to spend much larger amounts of GOP money defending their seats.
The main difference between Daily Kos and other liberal political blogs, such as Atrios or Talking Points Memo, is the sheer volume of content on the site. Daily Kos is not a standard blog, but an interactive site powered by the collaborative media application Scoop, by which user comments are privileged similarly to blog entries. Thus, while Moulitsas and several others post entries directly to the front page, the site also features "diaries," user entries that flow into the site at a speed of up to several per minute. These are identical in format to the main posts, and can advance to 'recommended diary' status by user vote, and at Moulitsas's discretion can be promoted to the front page.
Daily Kos attracted some controversy in 2004 by posting comments about U.S. military contractors killed in Iraq that many considered to be insensitive. Moulitsas is, however, El Salvadoran, and formed a negative opinion of contract military personnel during his childhood in El Salvador, in which mercenary fighters committed atrocities against the civilian population.
Daily Kos also contains permanent articles, glossaries, and other content, including dKosopedia, a collaborative information clearinghouse available for open editing as a WikiWiki, with its contents licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The site is sustained by advertising, mostly for political candidates and timely political books.
Daily Kos is the largest Scoop site, having surpassed Kuro5hin. The creator of Scoop, Rusty Foster, is a technology consultant for Zuniga's company.