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February 09, 2004

Joi's session
: The last session of the day....
: Joi notes that there have been a lot of white American males talking about blogs.
: Continuing the thread, Ethan Zuckerman of GeekCorps (tall, long-hair, white American) calls himself the session's African representative.
: Zuckerman says blogs give new perspective on already reported stories, not original reporting. To get new news, "we can't rely on citizen bloggers at this point."
: Ethan touts AllAfrica.com as an aggregator of African news. Joi is looking for a human connection (an African Salam Pax) to help him care about the news there.
: Joi touts Witness.org, which empowers people in difficult human-rights environments by giving them video cameras.
: Ethan: "What's interesting in blogs is not the a-lists. What's interesting is what filters its way up to the a-lists."
: Joi says that when you get traffic, you start becoming more careful about what you blog about because you'll get attacked (and he uses me as an example only because I'm in his line-of-sight). Not sure I agree. If that were the case, I guess I'd quit.
Joi adds later that it's now much less about hanging out for him and more about publishing.
: Ethan touts IranFilter, which does a good job of reading Persian blogs and news and bringing it to the English-speaking world.
: He touts NKZone, Rebecca McKinnon's blog on North Korea.
: Next success story: BlogAfrica.
: Ethan says talk radio has had an almost revolutionary impact on politics in Africa (just like here!).
: SmartMobs moment: Ethan says that when there was an incident of vote fraud in an election in Ghana, voters with cell phones called this into talk radio and the authorities had to investigate. Result: Low fraud.
He suggests coming up with technology to help reduce corruption (when asked for a bribe, add it to a data base of bribers).
: Joi says that when Americans want to spread democracy they mean putting it under American control. Unfair. In a more balanced audience, that would have gotten a loud moan.
: I ask Ethan what the three most important things are to encourage citizens' media in these other nations. He lists:
1. Free, high-quality web-hosting. The problem isn't just money but payment; the people he works with don't use credit cards.
2. Instruction in the local language. That is what Hoder did.
3. Local leaders who show the way.
: Ethan's working next on community radio.
: Ethan is organizing a trip to Africa in September. Takers?
: An inspiring panel....

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Unlike-minded
: Tim Oren puts his finger on one of the great appeals of certain political blogs: The very human search for a home:

As a centrist (by averages) I've found political bloggers who are strongly on one side or the other to be profoundly unpersuasive, whether it's Kos or the Corner. Give me an honest, open, conflicted voice, whether it be Sullivan, Totten or Roger Simon. Someone who has had their world rocked, is looking for a home, and is therefore forced to tease out the issues with a voice that does not come from one of the echo chambers. These I find (at least) engaging and capable provoking new thinking, while those waging a full frontal assault based on premises I do not share are at best irrelevant and at worst repellant.

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Powering the revolution
: Here's a triple success story for Blogads:The Chandler for Cogress campaign bought probably a few grand worth of ads on blogs and has in no time raised $40,000. That's a win for Chandler (in the Dean model Trippi himself extolled this morning: let your money multiply online). It's a win for Blogads. And it's a win for blogs. Now we need to find the ways to make this explode, for it will.

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MoveOn
: Wes Boyd of MoveOn is speaking and I'm struck at how soft-spoken he is, to the point of droning. You might expect an energetic firebrand. Not at all.
: Matt Welch asks him for details of his relationship with George Soros. Not much comes out.
: A questioner scolds him for not having a blog. He says, oddly, that the problem with having content on the site is that someone can come in an attack you for it. Huh?
: Boyd: "I don't know whether this medium is going to be driven toward monopoly or driven toward diversity." Oh, come on, the medium is all about diversity, diversity that can't be stopped. But, listen to that point above: MoveOn, not unlike the Dean space, isn't quite as open as it seems; it selects issues from within a like-minded sphere; it controls the process if not the outcome.
: This is another echo chamber. And that's OK; it's people united behind a common cause. But you can't act, as Boyd does, that he knows what "the people" are saying, that "the people" really care about, say, media consolidation. Wishful thinking.
: Tim O'Reilly asks about trying to get people who disagree to talk together "so we build a participatory decmoracy that isn't still one side against the other." Right question. Boyd: "You pull people in not through extreme partisan rhetoric" and instead talk like a centrist. O'Reilly calls him on it: It's not centrist. Boyd: "We feel pretty centered." That's about yoga, not politics.
It's a right line of questioning. Can one site or service bring together dialogue or does the medium do it, creating bridges across divides from one like-minded sphere to another, differently like-minded sphere?

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Echo-o-o- chamber-r-r-r
: One issue at this Emergent Democracy conference is the echo chamber -- not the echo chamber of the Dean blog but the echo chamber of the conference. The stage is, a bit too appropriately, set to the left. Almost all the speakers are of the left; MoveOn is up there now. Esther Dyson raised the issue at lunch; another questioner did on the floor. They said they tried hard to get speakers from the right. It certainly would have made for a meatier conference and would have given a better picture of how these camps view and use these tools. Too damned bad.
Matt Welch in the comments below says Richard Bennett should be here. That would have been a start. I don't want to just hear like-minded people. And for that matter, I don't want to hear just Americans. This is a worldwide political phenomenon being used by different people in different ways.

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Back
: Left you all for our journalism panel and then some good meaty hallway time meeting so many smart folks who hang out there.

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Bloggers on stage
: Doc is running a panel on blogging. He tells a great story about getting a tour of the Dean HQ via a laptop cam and "meeting" Joe Trippi that way.
: David Weinberger says that what excites him about this so much is just how unofficial it is; it's not undersecretaries of something blogging, it's the people.
: Halley says she reads first the bloggers she least agrees with. She starts with Andrew Sullivan.
She has a good list of 10 trends of political blogging.
: The guy in front of me is playing solitaire. Different clicks for different folks.
: Dave Weinberger says it's fascinating that political blogs turned out to be as much social as informational. "They're really not about information at all. They're about group-forming." Right. Amen. (I said that some weeks ago.)
: Dave says the inefficient interaction of the comments on the Dean blog turned into an advantage: It's hard to flame someone as an asshole when their comment just scrolled up .
: Phil Wolff (Joi's picture here) asks how to keep people involved when the election is over. Doc asks what this is without an election. I shout (rudely) it's local government. Someone else (Ruby) shouts it's political action on issues. She also says, when asked by Doc, that she plans to get back to local politics when this is over because she wants to have an impact. Doc asks the audience how many people want to get more involved in local politics now. Many hands raised. Impressive.
: Dave: "If you want to see a real echo chamber, don't read the candidates' blogs, read the daily newspaper... That's the echo chamber that really worries me."

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Pundits, all
: CampaignDesk.org is now compiling the most notable notes from blog pundits. A good public service.

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MeetUp
: Scott Heiferman is doing a great job showing this world the weeek in MeetUp: Pugs meetup; PHP in Melbourne (with five geeky guys); Cooper Mini meetup... What should get attention is the fast-growing conservative TownHall meetups, now numbered 300. That is to say that this is just a tool, it's not a constituency. Anyone can use the tool. Dean can use it. Conservatives can use it. Everybody can use it. And I hope they all do.
: Scott says it's not just about the global village. It's local. It's getting more and more local.
: "Whether it's MeetUp.com or whatever, the cat is out of the bag. The cat is out of the bag. People know they can organize themselves."
: Scott says we're in a new political era. From the 1800s to mid 1900s, it was an era of joiners, organizers, members. From the mid 1900s until now it was the era of TV, the Beltway, PACs, direct-marketing. Now, he says (hopes) that we're entering the "era of net-powered grassroots."
: Scott says there are now MeetUps automatically generated for anyone running for governor, Congress and the Senate. (What about local?)
: He says that double-digit percentages of Americans used to get together for meetings. Now we don't. And the delicious irony is that the Internet -- the thing that was supposed to be making us antisocial -- is helping bring us out to meet again. The Internet is the ultimate social software.
" The net doesn't care if it's chihuaua's or Kerry..." Right. It's a tool for all.
: He says the key to success is to "get the hell out of the way." Right. Hand the keys to the people and see where they will drive.

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Influencers influencing influencers
: The IPID.org study of online political citizens (great stuff; PDF here) finds that a very high proporation of them (us) -- 70 percent -- are "influentials."
That's why it does not matter how big this is; it's already big enough and will get bigger.
: 59 percent of Iowans used the Internet at some point to help with their decision to vote. Big enough...
: The study finds that Kerry won Internet voters. Says the PowerPoint: "Dean failed to close the deal. He steppe don his message. Just as Dean's success cascaded through the network he created, so did his failure. He got people energized, they came out to ote, but voted for someone else. Influentials have influence."

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Blog art
: Hugh MacLeod is watching what's happening here; he drew a cartoon about it and scanned it in and sent it to Joi; Joi just blogged it.

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Answers to the Trippi money questions
: Ed Cone asks Joe Trippi him about Trippi's compensation in the Dean campagin. "Talk to us about the whole Joe Trippi getting rich thing," Ed says. Good reporting on Ed's part.
Trippi talks about how a fundraising dinner works: You spend $350k on a room to get $1 million and it's considered a success.
He talks about spending $100,000 in Austin, Texas, to buy media and get attention and raise funds in Bush's backyard. It's an investment, he says -- better than "eating steak and potatoes at some big gala.
"On the get-rich quick scheme. I don't know what bothers me more, the implication that I'm a thief or that I'm a really bad thief.... I made about $165,000 on the Dean camapign, personally.... That's a lot of money. But that's not $7.5 or $7.2 million."
He says the LA Times story was an attack:
"How do you stop the movement dead in its track? Well, you convince people it's a Trippi get-rich-quick scheme."
He says he never had the authority for budget and spending -- a very important fact. That does deal with potential conflict of interest.
He says if he were a bad thief, he would have gotten a lot more spent on TV.
"This isn't just trying to knock me down. This is trying to knock the whole thing down. They're trying to get people to buy into this notion that it was all some get-rich-quick scheme and it wasn't."
There's news from eTech.
This should have been reported better before.

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Trippi speaks
: This will be the most covered event since Janet Jackson's performance. Latops, cameras, clicking keyboards everywhere.

: "Broadcast journalism has failed us miserably," he says. There is not adequate coverage of the Patriot Act or the Digitital Millenium Copyright act except on the net.

: "The system is broke, rotted, corrupted...."
The Dean anger continues...

: Rheingold is posting like mad. Jay Rosen is taking notes on a yellow pad. He thinks first, blogs later. Dave Weinberger is also blogging like mad.

: Trippi says he's amazed that "the press who could frankly never figure out what the Dean campaign was now somehow feel qualified to define whether it was a success or not."
(Well, losing elections is one measure. A campaign is still a campaign. It's about winning....)

: There is only one tool, one medium that allows the American people to take their government back, he says, and that is the Internet.

: "This was not a dotcom crash. The Howard Dean campaign was a dotcom miracle." Agreed.

: "This is about understanding that no one is going to change America for you. You have to change America for yourself."
The anger continues...

: Trippi credits Jerome Armstrong's blog at MyDD for introducing him to the idea of MeetUp.com

: "MoveOn.org is the real pioneer of the movement."

: "The political press in this country has no clue what the Internet is... They put it in their old context.... The Internet community doesn't really in many ways understand the hard, cold realities of American politics. And that's the clash that's happening right now..."
In politics, is there an Internet community? Don't think so. It's a tool for all communities.

: The Scream: "It wasn't news. It was entertainment.. It was the heat-seeking missle getting its target.... That really was damaging, not what the governor did, but the media's portrayal of it... Now they're all apologizing."
Sorry, it was news. The people talked about it. The people determine what news is. And among everyone I know, the Scream was news. And, yes, it was the excuse many were looking for not to vote for him. This is a "hard, cold reality" of politics; people also judge character and personality.

: If Howard Dean had retired as governor, "where would the Democratic party be, where would our Democracy be today?... It's because of the blogs." He argues, strenuously, that the Dean revolution changed the election. I think we'll find he's right. Too soon to know.

: "This isn't going to stop. Broadcast politics is on the wane. The media juimped the shark first time on the war. They jumped the shark on the Dean campaign."

: "I think our democracy's really threatened right now in ways the American people haven't really grasped right now."
Again, the anger, with a dash of paranoia.

: He takes the Democrats to task for taking more big contributions than the Republicans. It's a betrayal of the Democratic party's roots, he says. The Dean campaign "turned that on its head."

: He calls 1776 "revolution 1.0."

: I love this thing, the Internet, weblog, citizens' revolution. But the hubris is thick. Too thick, I think.

: What I'd really like to hear from Trippi is What We Could Have Done Better. Maybe it's too soon for that.

: I'm flashing that all this blogging is just like the "instant analysis" broadcast pundits used to give us (until it got cooties). The difference is that this is even more instant -- it's another sound track -- and it's coming from all corners.

: "Al Gore's endorsement is not bad. I don't buy that... What happened is that alarm bells went off in every newsroom in the country and in every other campaign in the country.... That alarm said kill Howard Dean this second. Cau's of we don't kill this son of a b right now, he's going to be the nominee of the party."
My spin alarm is going off. Whoop. Whoop.
Could it be that voters don't like Gore? I voted for the guy and I don't like him.

: He tells a tear-jerker story about a woman who "sold my bike for democracy." She got $79 and sent it to the Howard Dean campaign. Insert joke about 15 percent commission here...

: He says that what they built must survive. Right. Amen. Now tell me how.

: Hmmmm. I wonder if the lazy, too-easy analysis of the press is not in tearing down the Dean Internet revolution -- and Dean -- but in prematurely building them up. Just wondering....

: "This campaign was the first campaign really owned by the American people. Now we have to build a movement owned by them."
Movements are, by definition, owned by the people.
These tools are not owned by one movement or one campaign. They will be used by anyone; that is their power.
I love what Dean created. But it's not proprietary to any ideology. And I do have problems with the chronic anger, defensiveness, and hubris.

: Just went to the BlogForAmerica comments and thought I'd see someone blogging Trippi in there. Nope.

: Much of the audience gives Trippi a standing O.

: Ed Cone now asks questions.

: Broadcast media is Trippi's big, bad guy.

: See the post above on campaign finances.

: Trippi wonders what would have happened if a campaign had run 365 grass roots candidates for Congress. He sputters: "Not in competition with the party..." But wherever there's a Democrat, this would have been competition. "It might have been dangerous," Trippi acknowledges. Well, yeah. That would have been taking over the party, indeed.

: Trippi says he miscalculated on Clark and thought he wasn't going to run; it affected his spending. He wishes he could take that one back. "I guessed wrong."

: On becoming the frontrunner: "There was a, pardon the expression, holy shit moment."
He says when he became frontrunner, people were less motivated to give money. And they didn't know how to communicate "we need your help now more than ever."

: A guy says he ran an Internet campaign for Congress in 1992 and he learned that net politics aren't local, they are global. He asks when it will get local.
Trippi says he's not sure the net is mature enough for that yet.
"The Internet community in Iowa is, for all intent and purposes -- I don't want to offend anyone -- nonexistent."
So how did the Internet, then, revolutionize the party as Trippi said above? Because influencers influenced influencers. And because it created buzz.

: Again, he repeats, "the failure is broadcast politics." Trippi, like Dave Winer, makes this the Internet vs. TV. I don't buy that. TV will always be there, along with newspapers. The Internet adds so much. It can't win that war. It shouldn't try.

: Dan Gillmor asks what it will take to get a different kind of journalism with different power and authority. Trippi cites, as we all do, the Trent Lott affair when he says that is beginning.
Trippi says Dean was the hottest thing on the INternet but he couldn't get the press to cover that story, to go to a MeetUp with a camera.
They didn't write about it until the story became money. "It's the money, stupid."

: Dan Sifry's brother asked, "Who owns BlogForAmerica.com? Who knows the list?"
Important question gets applause.
Trippi: "I don't know."
He says there is an issue to controlling the names and addresses, otherwise so many parts of the campaign will contact people that it will turn into spam.
Ed asks him to guess what happens to the blog.
Trippi says he's going to do something. (I heard at breakfast that he has a domain for it.)
He says he has "deep apprehensions" about it going to the Democratic party.

:Next up: The Institute for Politics Demoracy and the Internet presents a study of "online poltiical citizens."

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The echo chamber
: I'm at the hotel restaurant at ETech with Doc, Dave, Loic, Halley, and other leading lights. That wonderful moment comes when someone (you know who you are, Doc) discovers that the wi-fi stretches into here. Laptops come out. The scene has to be captured on digital cameras. More cameras come out. Cameras take pictures of cameras taking pictures of laptop.
: And over in another booth is Joe Trippi, getting ready for his talk.
: If you weren't jealous before, you'll be jealous now: I'm sitting next to Howard Rheingold, Joi Ito, Dan Gillmor, Steven Levy, Halley Suitt, David Isenberg, and more. It's not me. It's the strip of power strips.

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Notes from the road
: I overhear the guy next to me on plane -- a nice enough banker -- saying to the stewardess, "Actually, what I usually hear is that I look like Ben Affleck"....
Crappy Kate Hudson movie, Le Divorce, on the flight. It was at the European opening that Hudson infamously said that Americans disgusted her. And her movie apparently didn't wow Americans, either. Direct to Continental....
But the movie inspires the guy in the next seat. He calls his wife with an idea for their vacation: Paris! She was not similarly inspired....
San Diego is, well, seedy. Shut down tight. Nowhere to buy so much as a can of Coke downtown. Homeless sleeping at every storefront. They need Rudy Guliani....
I walk over to the ETech hotel (I'm a few blocks away) just to stretch the airline-compressed legs and I know I've arrived in geek heaven. In the hotel bar, every single patron has a laptop open. One is sleeping in a chair with laptop atop lap....
I walk back to the hotel and pass the only store or restaurant open and brightly lit downtown: A Larry Flynt Hustler store, slick and sleek, with couples going in to shop and young ladies buying the fashions. No, I didn't buy anything. Who needs porn when I can go back to the hotel and watch the Grammys?

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