BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

August 28, 2003

Wi-Fi and the political conventions
: Will the Democratic and Republican conventions be wi-fi'ed?
They should be.
The press should demand it: instant communication.
The delegates should demand it: instant politicking.
We should demand it: Instant blogging, a new perspective on what has become a dull, predictable, stage-managed, unimportant event.

: Update: In the comments comes this fascinating insight into technology and TV news from someone at ABC News:

Greetings:

I read your post about Wi-Fi at the political conventions with great interest. I am a project manager for the operations division of ABC News and we are actively working with both parties to encourage them to make Wi-Fi available not only at the conventions but also during the primaries.
We are planning to use Wi-Fi for our own production oriented activites including email and, to a lesser degree, for sending video files to our news room. ABC News has trained a number of its correspondents to shoot video in the field and transmit it using a laptop and DV camera.

: When I complained about having problems with my high-speed access at Doubletree (did I remember to tell you: Doubletree sucks?), a quick-thinking of marketing at Wayport popped right in to offer his help.
Let's see who's quickest on this: Who will volunteer to wi-fi the conventions and primaries for media, participants -- and bloggers, getting great publicity and goodwill in the process: Wayport, T-Mobile, Boingo....

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Geek love
: Cory Bergman finds a frightening bit of sociology in his TiVo newsletter:

Talk about a geek loser. A Brooklyn man says he used TiVo's digital photo feature to propose to his girlfriend. Ted Linhart streamed a picture of himself holding a sign that read "Will You Marry Me?" to his living room DVR so that his gal Rachel would see the on-screen proposal as she walked through the door. Unbelievably, she said yes.

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Belch
: I was dying to go to In 'n' Out Burger... until I saw this. Layne, Welch, what do you have to say to this?

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Voices of September 11th
: Michele was aghast that media plan to pay little attention to the second anniversary of September 11, so she started Voices, a project to gather memories and reflections on the day.

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Come on down!
: FoxNews has been playing and replaying a clip of Sean Hannity's show in which he quizzes Arnold Schwarzenegger on issues, one after another.
If the California campaign is a game show, this is the lightning round.

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A better man than I, Gunga Din
: John McCarthy, the British journalist who was held hostage by Islamic Jihad for more than five years, is returning to Beirut and also going to Iraq and Iran to do a TV documentary. I'd bring along some Marines, a few Mossad veterans, and P Diddy's posse, if I were him.

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Howard Dean has nothing on me
: My embryonic experiment in hyperlocal blogging has attracted the attention of a local politician running for county office. The guy's a Democrat in the land of suburban Republicans. I've told him he should blog.

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Our guys in Afghanistan
: Ben Hammersley finds another Afghanistan blogger, an aid worker:

We just had one of our expats resign today after only two weeks.
She's never travelled outside of Europe before and I think Kandahar is freaking her out. I guess it's not for everybody this bouncing around war zones swatting flies and trying to come to terms with 45 C daily temperatures. Sometimes I wake up feeling like Martin Sheen in the opening ten minutes of Apocalypse Now and go to bed feeling like Brando in the last ten minutes. Mr. Kurtz could live here in splendid madness as easily as Vietnam or the Congo. Armed thugs ripping around the IDP camp last night set the tone for the whole bloody day. One shitty thing after another.

: And Ben files another report from a Kabul Internet cafe (I think we're leaving the stone age):

Yesterday I moved from my hotel into the spare room of the house of the correspondent here for Radio France. Sebastian is trying to start a little side business by renting out rooms, drivers and LandCruiser he is about to buy, to visiting journos and documentary crews. His driver, Babrack, although probably not spelt that way, is an ex-Mujahadeen who credits Stallone’s performance in Rambo 3 for teaching him the correct technique for firing a rocket launcher and looking good at the same time.

: Update: Thanks to a commenter, I now see that the Afghanistan blog appears to have been taken down. I smell a bureaucrat.

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