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December 18, 2003

Rumors of a former President
: Stuart Hughes of the BBC blogs this news:

RUMOUR MILL: International broadcasting networks are showing heightened twitchiness over the health of a certain former American president.

Just a rumor, but you heard it there first.

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Whither Winer?
: John Robb says Dave Winer's moving on from Harvard Law's Berkman Center. Too bad if so. He has done amazing things there, BloggerCon not the least of them.

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Back to the future
: Mark Glaser has his look back and forward at OJR. Many luminaries quoted.

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Buy your BlogCards!
: Hugh MacLeod, the artist and ad expert who draws great cartoons on the backs of business cards, is offering to sell you the front of those very cards.
I'm ordering some.
They're BlogCards. When I go to conferences, confabs, parties, and other fun events where bloggers hang out, I want to hand out a card with my URL (not my office address). I need a BlogCard. So I'm ordering some from Hugh.
I can't decide whether to get the one above or below. What do you think?
Go here and choose your own from 28 designs (more coming soon)...

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Baghdad by the Bay
: Jettison in the comments does the Wired thing with the Baghdad bloggers:
Raed - Expired
Salam - Tired
Zeyad - Wired

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Blogger sells out... to Hollywood
: First this, then this.

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The Treo cult marches on
: Paul Boutin declares the Treo the hot gadget de la saison and declares the separate PDA dead.

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The birth of appointment radio (and audio TiVo)
: Fred Wilson heralds the coming of digital radio in America. At last.
The biggest change for me: I will be able to listen to my only two appointment radio shows -- Howard Stern and Kurt Andersen's Studio 360 -- by recording them; I'll be able to TiVo radio.
This will change radio. I'll bet that there will -- for the first time since the advent of TV -- be other appointment radio shows. Now, to get a decent audience, you have to do what Howard does: fill four hours of morning drive. And it's not easy to target advertising. In a digital world, radio will go what TV has gone through -- that is, it will have to create more shows instead of just stations that attract us. Radio will have to compete with our MP3s. That will be good for radio programming and us.
Can't wait. So Fred says, don't wait:

This conversion will take some time. But its starting in 2004. I hope you are as excited about it as i am. If you are, please call your favorite radio stations and ask them to put up a digital signal this year. And then go out and buy an HD Radio for your home and your car.

OK, WXRK and WNYC, you're on notice: Convert.

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Pacific So-called, Alleged, Reputed, Supposed "News" Service
: The PNS lists four questions for Saddam from one Larry Everest. Are they about why and how did he murder hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen? Are they about why he launched wars against his neighbors? Are they about why he tortured and raped and allowed his family henchmen to torture and rape is citizens? Are they about why and how he suppressed any freedom in his country for so long? No, his questions are about only the big, bad CIA.

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Before the body's cold
: Would it be in bad taste to apply for Michael Wolff's job?

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If you can't beat 'em...
: Steve Outing says that America's online journalism awards should include weblogs. Damned straight. You can treat them as competition or you can embrace them. Which seems like the wiser course?

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How to solve the 9/11 memorial problem
: And there is a big problem. The finalists have received, most generously expressed, a collective shrug from New York and the world. The judges have delayed their decision and said they will likely change whatever we've seen, indicating that they, too, are not pleased with the results. The process is, as reader Frank Hood says in an email to me, at "quagmire status."
But Hood has a solution, a downright brilliant solution:

Before
throwing the entire process out or attempting to ram an unpopular design
down the public's throat, the proper thing to do is to show the public the
rest of the 5200 designs.
The LMDC said they took high resolution digital pictures of each design
before showing them to the jury. A small investment of $40,000 would buy
them the servers and web design to post everything on the internet with
enough bandwidth for the needed access by the public. Looking at 5200
designs is daunting? Well yes, but that's the magic of the web. Some
people would look at all of them and link the ones they like. Others would
get a group together and divide and conquer. The good will bubble to the
top quickly. If the jury is truly right at having picked the best designs,
the rest of us will know it soon enough. The result of a few weeks of
picking over the entries by the online community would either be the
emergence of a few entries that people really like, a grudging consensus
that the jury is right after all, or the demand to start over, changing the
process.

Brilliant, right? What's so great about this is that it takes advantage of the power of this medium: links. Yes, viewing 5,201 (to be exact) entries is a daunting prospect. But by the time Web viewers get finished, they'll have whittled that to, oh, a few dozen notable entries. Technorati could even catalogue the links to them (though, no doubt, some will get links because they're strange or bad; links are not votes). But then the press can take advantage of this audience-editing and find the most notable and put them in newspapers and the discussion widens. Neither Hood nor I are suggesting that this should be a plebiscite. What it does instead is open up the process, allow all of us to feel involved and to help point to those designs that touch us and speak to us. There are bound to be surprises there.
In addition, this also meets the jury's fine goal of displaying all the proposals as a memorial in and of itself. The heart and soul that went into those 5,201 entries will be, I guarantee you, inspiring.
So, LMDC, how about it? I'm sure you could find plenty of companies willing to host this (volunteers?). I'm sure you'd find any number of talented people happy to design the pages (volunteers?). Put up a tip jar and I'll contribute to the cost.
Let's do it.

[For those new to this blog, my full disclosure: I submitted a proposal but I'm not pushing for this as a way to get it back into consideration; that's not why I did it; I did it just to be part of the bigger memorial.]

: See also some new posts on the quagmire from Greg Allen.

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Help me with my senior moment... Have you seen this story...
: Just this morning, as I dashed through mountains of RSS feeds, I saw a post or a story that said that Google will compete with all ecommerce retailers and just about everybody on earth. But now I can't find it or remember where I saw it. It's not on John Battelle's Searchblog (though it probably will be soon). Anybody else see that? Can you refresh my feeble memory?

: But this reminds me (see, it's not dead) that one feature I really want is a search among just my bookmarked sites -- to solve this very problem.

: UPDATE: Found it. Shoulda known it would be on PaidContent.org. Next time I lose my car keys, I'll just look there.

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Iranian censorship
: A new weblog tracks just Iranian Internet censorship. The whole world is watching.

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Gawker birthday
: It's Gawker's birthday. What an amazing rise. In only a year, Gawker:
- Established itself as a must-read in media, fashion, and other stratospheric demographics.
- Got quoted everywhere, including on Page One of the New York Times.
- Established weblogs as a real media property.
- Made a star of and a paid career for foundress Elizabeth Spiers.
Creating not only a great new media property but proving the concept for a new medium is an amazing accomplishment by Nick Denton. He won't toot that horn. So I will. Congratulations, Nick, Choire, and Elizabeth.

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Saddam was nobody's puppet
: Mehdi Yahyanejad at Free Thoughts on Iran says Saddam chose his evil acts quite on his own.

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Jacko X
: Michael Jackson converts to the Nation of Islam. I can't wait to see him in that bow tie.

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See no good. Hear no good. Speak no good.
: Cox & Forkhum says it all:

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RSS Wintercast
: I just signed up.

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And what about the Jews?
: How come Jacques Chirac's (numbnutty) ban on wearing overt religious symbols is being portrayed in most media as a Muslim "headscarf ban," as Reuters puts it? It also forbids Jewish children from wearing skull caps -- Jewish children who have been attacked because they wear skull caps. Why are the headlines and leads all about Muslim scarves instead?

UPDATE: Pedram says "the French have officially lost it" and all this is...

...secularism gone mad. Just as wrong as it is for the Iranian government to force women to wear that scarf, it is equally wrong for the French to force them to shed it in public schools.
Where's the idea of personal freedoms in all this? and where does it stop? Will they also control what the student eat in case it's Kosher, or read to make sure there's no references to Allah? Even a member of Iranian Parliament gets it, but apparently Chirac does not. Iranian parliamentarian Ali Shakourirad said "The ban on headscarves is a measure to limit personal freedom. For a country like France, which has democracy, it is a major failure." He's right!

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Baghdad Bulletin bites the dust
: Just saw that the English-language Baghdad Bulletin has stopped publishing "due to fiduciary concerns." It was moderately anti-American, which probably has an impact on your business model when most of the folks who could use your publication are going to be criticized in it.

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Another story on Iraqi blogs
: Michael Silence has a story on Zeyad and the Iraqi bloggers in the Knoxville News. Your turn, NY Times.

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No-win
: The Telegraph gives us the anti-war media spin guide to all permutations of the Saddam saga, for example:

If the arrest, trial and possible execution of Saddam results in a free and democratic Iraq.
This is irrelevant to the War on Terror. Iraq had no links with al-Qa'eda. Bush and Blair will never defeat terrorism until they catch Osama bin Laden.

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Blogfight
: Salam and Raed are feuding on their blog.

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Followup
: Insta points to a Newsweek report that the memo contending that Mohammed Atta was in Iraq the summer before his attack is fabricated. So much for that.

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Calling Sen. Clinton... Calling Sen. Clinton...

: I know nobody's buying my scenario for Hillary Clinton coming into the campaign (doing unto Howard Dean as Bobby Kennedy did unto Gene McCarthy).
But let's look at more arguments in favor of this crazy scenario:

First, see, the NY Times poll today, showing that voters, including Democrats, are still shrugging and yawning at the entire Democratic field:

...But most voters, including most Democrats, are largely unmoved by any of the nine Democrats who are seeking to unseat President Bush, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll....
But Mr. Bush shows broad signs of strength going into the 2004 election. Voters continue to choose the Republican Party as better able to manage national security and foreign policy.
Democrats are battling a perception that they are fighting a losing battle, particularly after Saddam Hussein's capture in Iraq. In a question asked after his capture, voters said by three to one they expected Mr. Bush to win next year....
In a potential sign of concern for Democrats who are contemplating the prospects of a contest between Mr. Bush and Dr. Dean, one-quarter of registered voters already have an unfavorable view of Dr. Dean....
In one very rough measure, the number of voters who said they had a favorable view of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the field's strongest supporter of the military campaign in Iraq, jumped over the weekend.... Before the capture, 25 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they had a favorable rating of Mr. Lieberman. In the second poll, the number increased, to 37 percent....

Bad news for Democrats at every turn.
The war is simply not a winning issue. That is, Dean's issue is not a winning issue. Given any sniff of victory, the voters rush to the winning side (read: Bush or even Lieberman, not Dean). Another recent poll backs this up.

So the more Bush grows in polls and stature, the more nervous Democratic leaders will be. Oh, they could say, what the hell, let's let Dean be the sacrifice fly. But here's the problem with that: Dean is not just running for President. He's taking over their party.

Everett Ehrlich's wonderful piece in Sunday's Washington Post says that Dean is really a third-party candidate who is using his unique campaign structure (see the post/soliloquey below).

For all Dean's talk about wanting to represent the truly "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," the paradox is that he is essentially a third-party candidate using modern technology to achieve a takeover of the Democratic Party. Other candidates -- John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark -- are competing to take control of the party's fundraising, organizational and media operations. But Dean is not interested in taking control of those depreciating assets. He is creating his own party, his own lists, his own money, his own organization. What he wants are the Democratic brand name and legacy, the party's last remaining assets of value, as part of his marketing strategy. Perhaps that's why former vice president Al Gore's endorsement of Dean last week felt so strange -- less like the traditional benediction of a fellow member of the party "club" than a senior executive welcoming the successful leveraged buyout specialist. And if Dean can do it this time around, so can others in future campaigns.

If they're not careful, the Democratic leadership will lose both the election and their party.

Who can ride to the rescue? I can think of only one person who could step in above the current field: Hillary. If she were only a sacrifice, she would not do it, Lord knows. But even losing the election, she could win two fights: She could hold onto the party for the moderate, Clinton wing. And as the first serious woman candidate for President, I contend that she could actually set herself up for a stronger run in 2008.

Crazy? Yes. But it's looking less crazy every day.

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Through the looking glass: Presidential weblogs

: Warning: I'm going to say three contrarian things. But holster that snarkgun until I'm done.

1. In terms of policy and substance, presidential campaign weblogs are not two-way. They are necessarily one-way.
2. In terms of policy and substance, presidential campaign weblogs must be essentially propagandistic.
3. In terms of organization, presidential campaign weblogs and community effectively exploit their participants.

Stop! I said to put down that snarkgun. Gimme a minute, huh?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, that is how things should be.

But it seems to me that we have been assuming -- in a case of accepted wisdom I now don't fully accept -- that presidential campaign weblogs and communities are all about the people gaining control of campaigns. That's true mostly in an operational sense. But as as I thought about this and as I heard a few anecdoes from campaigns, I came to realize that in matters of policy and substance, this can't be so; presidential campaigns cannot cede too much control to their weblogs and communities. And here's why:

If we don't want candidates to shift with the winds of special interests and the gusts of polls, then we certainly don't want them to shift with the baby's breath of blog comments. No, a candidate must stand for something. A candidate must have a plan and principles and experience and ideas. They come to the party with that. I haven't heard of a case yet where a candidate has changed his stand because of what he read in his weblog or its comments. Of course not. So let's not go overboard saying that weblogs shift control. The candidate is still in control. Thus, it is one-way. That's my first thesis.

So now the second: The way the candidate controls the agenda is perhaps changing because weblogs and online community enable candidates to bypass media and speak directly to supporters. But the candidate and the campaign must control that message even in the midst of interactivity, for the interactivity speaks for the candidate and when voters come to the weblog to see what the candidate says, they must, in fact, see what the candidate says (not the minions). This is accomplished in a fascinating -- and perhaps new -- social structure that passes the party line through the troops, who in turn defend it and keep it pure when trolls invade and try to corrupt it. We've all heard how true believers in the Dean community beat down trolls by pledging to contribute more for every trollism. So this is about the collective distributing and confirming and maintaining the orthodoxy of the campaign. It's propaganda. I said this today to an American at lunch, who was horrified. "Jeff, you're saying it's Stalinistic!" I grinned and said, "Well, only for effect." Then I had coffee with somone raised in Eastern Europe. I went through the same scenario and he only nodded and said, "Of course." A politician must be propagandistic -- a politcian must control the message and spin the spin, whether that's for media or directly for citizens' media. That's my second point.

So now to the third thesis: The way in which the people really do gain some measure of control is in the operation of the campaign. And the Dean campaign has been very smart about using this dynamic to get people to do more things: Hey, people, invent new and wonderful ways to spread the message and elect our man. And they do. Here, the more two-way the process is, the better.

Now, once again, I'm not saying there's a thing wrong with any of this. It's how the world should work. But I do think that in some ways, we've gone overboard thinking that weblogs and communities are changing the essential nature of the relationship and conversation that is a campaign. They are changing the organization, profoundly. But they can't change the substance (or if they can, I haven't seen the evidence of it yet).

That makes weblogs and community in campaigns different from weblogs and community in media (where they are all about two-way conversation and influencers influencing influencers) and marketing (where -- once all marketers read Cluetrain -- they will realize that listening to your market is more important than marketing to them) and the academe (where this medium creates a perfect channel for discusssion) and even government (where a wise person in office will use these new channels to listen and learn and adapt). A campaign, on the other hand, is still about broadcasting a message to get elected.

: See also Everett Ehrlich's wonderful piece in the Washington Post last weekend on Dean's organizational use of weblogs and community. See Jay Rosen on new campaign narratives and on the Dean social experiment. And, of course, see Ed Cone's opus on the Dean machine.

: UPDATE: Matthew Stinson adds on.

: UPDATE: Ed Cone, the dean of reporters covering this phenom, has a response and he doesn't eviscerate me.

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