BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

October 08, 2004

The debate

: At this point, the discussion in Iraq is forging no new ground. It's repetitive. This is a rerun with motion added.

: "That answer almost made me want to scowl." Best line Bush has had in either debate.

Better than scowling is getting pissed and cutting off Charlie Gibson.

Otherwise, the guy is doing mental botox. He's doing everything he can not to move a single facial muscle.

: "I hear there's rumors on the internets that we're going to have a draft," says the Bushes. "We're not going to have a draft. Period." They can't repeat that enough. And he repeated it: "We're not going to have a draft so long as I'm the President." Kerry said, "I don't support a draft."

: Kerry will never use the phrase "global test" again but he keeps doing the alliance tango and that keeps bothering me. We cannot hinge our defense and policy on the French.

: Both Kerry and Gibson mucked it up: It's not a question of if but a question of when, guys. Get it straight.

: Bush should be bragging about tomorrow's election in Afghanistan. Kerry should be acknowledging the value of building democracy in the world.

: "The National Journal named Senator Kennedy the most liberal senator of all," says Bush.

Uh, don't we mean Senator Kerry.

That's OK. They do look like, those guys from Mass.

: Wonkette says: "Also: Kerry is the first presidential candidate in history to go out of his way to remind people he's a lawyer." He also goes out of his way to say he's an altar boy.

: Usually at these town hall things, the people they pick are dorky. This bunch is not.

: Jet lag. Jet lag. I'm zoning. The environment always does that to me. Trees. Owls. Birkenstocks.

: Stem cell. Kerry's issue. Supreme Court: Kerry again for me.

: Mistakes. The lady asks Bush about mistakes. We'll see whether he has an answer this time. Well, actually, he didn't but at least he didn't do the hummuda-hummuda thing again. Kerry uses this to sing the Coke theme again -- "true global coalition;" another mistake.

: Draw. Which is to say nobody wins, including us. More lively. Both were more in command.

Come to think of it, if it's a draw, then it's a Bush victory, since this time, he was coming up from behind.

: At the end, the candidates block Charlie's Teleprompter. Now that's my favorite moment.

The questions from the audience were better than anything Charlie would have given us.

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Not The New York Times

: There's a blog -- obviously a parody -- from NY Timeas poliscribe Adam Nagourney.

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Indecent indecency bill sidelined!

: Great news from Washington, it appears: The indecent indecency bill has been dropped from the defense bill to which it was attached and Broadcasting & Cable says it won't come up again until the next Congress. Like the Induce bill, it will raise its ugly head again, but let's hope sanity intervenes. [via Lost Remote]
: The Washington Post report here.

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Mount Saint Howard

: An unnamed Clear Channel exec says of Howard Stern's move to satellite: "I have never witnessed anything as cataclysmic as this. This is a wake-up call to everyone in radio."

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Where the money is

: Steve Rubel will be blogging the Association of National Advertisers confab.

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Indtv

: I had the good luck to go to the brand new headquarters of Indtv, the network aimed at young Americans started by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt.

This week, they moved into an old coffee-roasting factory across from the city's new baseball park. This was to be eTrade's HQ and they spent a fortune making it gorgeous and cool -- but we know what happened to companies that spent lots of money showing off; it sat vacant for years. Now, there are just a few people scattered in a sea of sleek cubes. The first floor is a cafe and they plan to expose it and the control room to the street to draw in people from the now-sleek neighborhood.

I had lunch next door with Hyatt and Indtv's vp for online, Joanna Drake Earl, and I came away impressed and eager to see what they come up with. They have not invented the network yet. They truly believe that the people will invent it. And that's what will make this so much fun to watch.

They've started recruiting digital correspondents -- DCs in their early jargon -- and have been inundated with well more than 1,000 applications. And it's not an easy application: essay questions and tryout videos. Joanna showed me one empty office filled with boxes and boxes of tapes. They've started watching them and Joel is jazzed by what he sees. These are the people who will invent the net.

We talked a lot about online and how it will mesh with the network; about blogs and vlogs and wikis and all that; about helping the citizens create great video. I didn't go there to report on their plans and, anyway, it still too early to do so.

Keep your eye on Indtv (or whatever they end up calling it).

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Web 2.0: After

: It may have seemed as if this blog was hijacked by a demigeek, what with all the Web 2.0 posts. I got in as a blogger, so I blogged. And it was a good conference with many good moments, so I was glad to. But it's over. A few uber observations:

: Trust is an organizing principle. In our world of instant access to everything, we'll get what we want we want with a little help from our friends -- via links as a measure of trust (see Google and Technorati and more to come).

: We want to control our data. There was much discussion of big, bad companies' efforts to keep us by keeping control of our data: the roach motel strategy, as Steve Gillmor called it. They get our email (Yahoo) or our reputation (eBay) or our IM (AOL) and don't want us to export or sync it with anyone else. But that is clearly a losing strategy. See Jarvis' First Law of Media.

: Open source rules: Whether via Kim Polese's new open-source-integrator business ... or a couple of wiki businesses out to replace expensive enterprise software ... or talk of the web, indeed, becoming our operating system ... or calls to have interoperable and open standards on phone OSs .... or talk of the big, old software industry's days being over ... it's clear that open-source is both the architecture and the culture of technology today.

You want real proof of this, go see VC Fred Wilson today:

I am selling all my microsoft stock tomorrow. They can't comepete with this tidal wave of community based software. It's too powerful.

: RSS has arrived. I know, it had arrived before. But the RSS session in which I participated was jammed. RSS kept coming up in every tech presentation. There were lots of RSS vendors: Feedburner, Topix, Rojo... I asked Tim O'Reilly to hold Syndicon, a conference to bring together the constituencies with interests in RSS so we can hammer out some issues and bring it to the masses.

: Podcasting will arrive: Much buzz about the new platform for radio. Doc even got it mentioned in Kim Polese's presentation. When Steve Gillmor asked a bunch of media guys about podcasting and it was clear they hadn't heard of it. "That's OK," Steve said to me, "until three weeks ago, we hadn't either."

: Citizens' media will arrive, too: Jason Calacanis was pissed that there were no bloggers in the media panel. Well, that could be a case of panel envy. Bloggers were everywhere. It would have been helpful to have a few more moments of distruptive citizen perspective. But that will come.

: Cool: Make the magazine. Snap the search engine. Rojo the RSS aggregator. Keyhole maps. Scroll down for links.

: The internet grew up. I mentioned that Jeff Bezos was more serious. Ditto Bill Gross of Idealab. Ditto everybody, really. The giddy, goofy days of tech are over. Likewise, the glum days are over, too (the fact that 600 influential people showed up for a conference on the web is the best demonstration of that). So it's a business and it's acting like one.

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Whereabouts

: Traveling today. Blogging if airport wifi allows.

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