This is from a real email sent out by the staff of MSNBC's "Hardball":

Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2004 13:28:19 -0700

From: "Hardball with Chris Matthews"

Subject: More From The Cool Hardball Blog

To: HARDBALL@LISTS.MSNBC.COM

Isn't it the law that if you refer to your own blog as "cool," it's automatically lame? If it's not the law, it should be.

Ok. By now, everybody is aware that bloggers are covering both major party conventions this year. Even The New York Times is making a big deal of it. In all honesty, it shouldn't be such a big deal even though it's something new. The bloggers who are covering them have been writing about politics for much of the past two or three years - at least - and seem to know what they're doing.

But what might need some attention are people like the folks at Hardball who view blogging as "cool" in and of itself and that, by blogging, they're instantly "cool." The real Hardball blog is OK. It's got permalinks. The blog's writers have gotten the whole link-to-other-sources-thing down. (Microsoft, after all, co-owns the organization and Bill Gates has been touting the benefits of RSS.)

But it's hard to get past the sense that the MSNBC blog is really kind of forced. Example: a blog exchange between David Schuster and Willie Brown over expensive ties.

Agree with him or not, what Atrios has been writing has a sense of sincerity (authenticity?) that the Hardball blog seems to lack. At least he's not referring to his own coverage as "cool."