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September 27, 2003

Campaigns by the people, for the people
: Steven Johnson creates a campaign ad on his blog. He says he hasn't decided who'll get his vote yet; the commercial is a whim. It's a proof of concept: that in this new, bottoms-up world of populist media, the winning strategies,the best strategies -- the memes with mo -- will come from the voters, now that they have a voice on the web:

Ever since the fall of Trent Lott, I've been fascinated by the thought of the web contributing ideas and strategy to political campaigns, and not just money and meetups. (Both of which are crucial, of course.) I have a feeling that as the 2004 campaign heats up, the blogosphere will become an increasingly rich source of "message" brainstorming, given how easy it is to put together a relatively polished attack ad these days.

More on this at Bloggercon...

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Funny, you don't look Jewish
: So I was sitting yesterday with some of my great colleagues at Ibby's, the greatest falafel in Jersey City (the greatest falafel I've ever had) and I'm watching across the street.
There's an old synagogue across the street and I see lots of men going in, more and more, the parade doesn't stop.
But, funny, they don't look Jewish.
Sure enough, it's a temple: Star of David in stone; appropriate symbolism in the stained-glass windows, Hebrew in stone.
The men are wearing head coverings, but they don't look like yarmulkes.
Irony of irony: It's a mosque. I wander across the street; only the mailbox -- and the shoes sitting in the vestibule -- mark this as a mosque. Otherwise, it just looks like an old temple.
I wonder whether they see the irony.

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The vast fast-food conspiracy
: I was so excited. Burger King has a new chicken sandwich. I loved fast food. But I can't eat the Whoppers and Quarter Pounders I used to. And I still have to go to the fast-food joints because that's what the kids eat. So I get excited when one of the giants comes up with a new, low-fat item. It's sad. But it's life.
So I went today to try the new Santa Fe Fire-Grilled Chicken Baguette.
What a slab of crap.
First, the thing is tiny. It's a frigging finger sandwich. The name is longer than the bread.
Second, they slather on a "southwestern sauce" (read: salsa for wimps) that is dreadful; it tastes like canned ratatouille.
Third, the chicken is mealy.
Fourth, the bread is tasteless.
What a damned disappointment.
I wonder whether it is a vast fast-food conspiracy: They make the low-fat stuff taste so dreadful that you have no choice but to keep eating the fries.

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Google allowance
: While everyone and his uncle is talking about starting business empires out of online blogs and interactivity, my 11-year-old son and guru is making a business online. He runs a forum where friends talk about the things friends talk about (don't go leaving your boring adult political opinions there, please... but feel free to click on the ads!) and he signed up for Google Adsense. I was, I'll admit, surprised that he was accepted; he was and put up the ads on all his inside pages. I was even more amazed at his news this morning that on his first day in business, he made $2.56.
Beats a lemonade stand.
Google: The new allowance.

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Stop the stop-the-war madness
: Harry Hatchett has a counter demonstration to the demonstration against the "occupation" of Iraq going on in lovely London town.
I have one suggestion to the marchers: Why don't you take the example of David Blaine and just shut up for 44 days?
To leave Iraq would be to leave it to anarchy, violence, economic chaos. These people want the U.S. to fail so badly that they would sacrifice the civility and lives of the Iraqi people to meet that goal. These people don't give a rat's rump about the Iraqi people.
And the liberation (nee occupation) of Iraq is ahead of, say, the liberation of Germany. Rumsfeld excerpted from the Washington Post:

“Within two months, all major Iraqi cities and most towns had municipal councils – something that took eight months in postwar Germany.
Within four months the Iraqi Governing Council had appointed a cabinet – something that took 14 months in Germany.
An independent Iraqi Central Bank was established and a new currency announced in just two months – accomplishments that took three years in postwar Germany.
Within two months a new Iraqi police force was conducting joint patrols with coalition forces.
Within three months, we had begun training a new Iraqi army – and today some 56,000 are participating in the defense of their country. By contrast, it took 14 months to establish a police force in Germany and 10 years to begin training a new German army.”

Freedom takes work.

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Nation of thumb-suckers
: The Guardian is trying to find the cosmic, politically correct meaning of magician David Blaines' 44-day stay in a plastic box in London:

But isn't there something obscene about turning starvation into a public spectacle when half the world suffers involuntary hunger? Even a chosen incarceration seems vaguely decadent when victims of tyranny rot in the world's jails.

Oh, ferchrissakes, it's just a publicity stunt. Much has been made about Britons' hostile reaction to Blaine and Americans' accepting attitude to his tricks. The difference is simple: We know show biz when we see it. We don't waste time getting mad at or analyzing a TV trick. We have lives.
Writer Michael Billington goes to the site of Blaine's stunt and interacts with the other Britons-without-lives who now hang out there, contemplating the meaning of it all and trying to find haughty intellectualism in even this.

But the bizarre paradox is that Blaine's act of imprisonment seems to have a liberating effect on the rest of us. Stay there long enough and you not only begin to forget your own rushed daily routine but meet lots of interesting new people. It says something about our own form of solitary confinement that it takes a man in a glass box to get us to open up to other human beings....
But, precisely because we can all attach our own private meaning to Blaine's action, this strange public confinement in the end acquires something of the unresolvable ambiguity of art.

Man, this guy could find the true meaning in a pile of dog poop.

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Armed bloggers
: A Michigan man having a zoning dispute over the trailers he put on his property has started a blog to tell his side, capture the press he's getting (he used audblog to broadcast a radio interview), and mobilize his supporters (he quotes another blogger who advises citizens to take tape recorders and digital cameras to the next town meeting so it can be posted online; he also links to my email chat with Jay Rosen and the prediction that bloggers will cover town meetings newspapers can't afford to cover).
All that's quite cool: power to the people and all that.
Just one more thing: This blogger has also recruited help from the Michigan Militia (whose site says that an "armed standoff" has been averted). Armed bloggers. Well, there are already lots of those. But they don't wear camoflauge.

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The Times Club
: If I didn't already subscribe to, read, and like The New York Times, its commercials certainly would never get me to start. What a bunch of pompous twits.

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Blog-bashing, sport of old-timers
: In a desperate plea to get publicity and links, The Paper bashes blogs [via Henry Copeland]:

...Time was—and what a glorious time it was—we could update our website with personal anecdotes, stories, bits of miscellaneous writing, and it hadn’t been given a name. Wired was still interesting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was fighting the good fight and we early adapters were going to change the world....
Sometime around 1999, our internetal offspring pulled up in their RVs and turned the web into a wasteland of irrelevance, indulgence and hackery. The weblog had been created, and the entire construct was ruined for everyone who’d inadvertently birthed and championed this "new form."
No, no, go ahead, bloggers and bloglovers, call it a publisher revolution. Just know that like Magic: The Gathering, fantasy football and rehab programs, blog culture is a circle jerk. Like missing a rerun of Friends, when you stop reading any given blog, life is no worse for it.
Blogging is not the new journalism. It’s the new zine. They will disappear when some of the more high-profile bloggers—those who came up from nothing with a will to write, not those high-vis journos who slummed in the freeform—find jobs in the mainstream press, where they clearly thirst to be. Their sites will atrophy, and the left-behinders will become bitter, scream "sellout" and lose interest.
The blog is a dead form within two years. On the outside.

How sad it is to be a has-been. How sad it is be an ass.

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