Thursday, January 29, 2004

NHPrimary.Com: Closing up shop. 

Notes from the Berkman Thursday meeting, with webcast and IRC. 

Rogers Cadenhead notes a bandwidth concern with the Trillian IM client.  

Dean said he needed centralized decision-making, and the bloggers pounce. I'd love to see a conference run with decentralized decision-making. I'm just an attendee. I get to decide who speaks. Why? Because decision-making is decentralized. Of course a campaign needs centralized decision-making. No question. But an election is a ouija board. The voters' decision is decentralized. Too many people believed the hype about Dean without thinking for themselves. Now you have to think. It wasn't a marvel of Internet technology, it was just an improvement, which ain't bad, but it's not a revolution. Here's the epitaph on Dean's of the Internet. It was 98 percent hype, two percent substance. The hype bought him an avalanche of free positive coverage in print, radio and television. The coverage, as usual, was bullshit. That was the juggernaut. Jim Moore, the insider, is the only analyst who has a story worth listening to. You're breathing each others fumes. Shame on you. So few people are thinking here. Just like the media we aspire to do better than, or so I thought. 

Four years ago: "Not only do you have to create the parachute while you're in free-fall, you also have to invent the damned thing!" 

Command Post: “He’s pathologically optimistic.” 

It's really gratifying to see Chris Lydon come down to earth re the Blogging of the Presidency meme he hitched his wagon to. Dean wasn't the savior, he was a candidate for president. But the people who stood up for Dean are revolutionaries. At best the Dean campaign was Netscape, inwardly focused, with a top-down map of the universe, with guess who at the top? This is the problem with looking to Presidential politics to be the venue for our salvation. Dean's choice was to start a new 25 percent party, or fire the Internet and try to stop Kerry. He chose the latter. That's fine. What about the rest of us? Find a local candidate who wants to win using the Internet, and as Picard said, make it so.  

When PubSub came out I signed up, using the service to do a vanity feed. It alerts me through RSS when it finds something with my name in it. The system isn't perfect, it repeats some items for days and days. Occasionally they dig up a gem from the past, like this post from Oliver Wrede in November, quoting Scripting, explaining why presidential candidate blogs of 2004 were destined to disappoint. "When people say they want the candidates to blog, they're not stating their wishes accurately. What they really want is to know the candidate as well as they know their favorite bloggers. If one writes publicly without editing every day for a few years, people get an idea of how your mind works. This builds trust, the kind of trust a candidate just can't build in a couple of months of stump speeches."