Wednesday, July 07, 2004

It's official, I will be at the Democratic National Convention, July 26-29 in Boston, covering it as a blogger. 

NY Times: "Providing Internet access on vessels and vehicles is not as simple as adding it to a fixed venue, like a restaurant or even a convention center." 

Eric Rice asks if there will be WiFi on the floor at the DNC. 

Daily Kos: Blogging the Convention. 

Jeff Veen: "Most bands and labels are posting free MP3s of their latest music on their sites. Add to that an army of fans scouring these sites daily, then blogging what they find. The result is a constant stream of new music being discovered, sorted, commented, and publicized. But how to keep up?" 

"No one was listening," said the NPR announcer, as she introduced the guy who posted the note on Tuesday morning about the new Edwards decals on the Kerry campaign plane. No one was listening, except for the people who were.  

Joe Trippi, get a clue. Geez Louise. He thinks the role of the Internet in politics is to raise money so they can run ads on TV. Look at how much good all those TV ads did for Howard Dean. You think he would have figured it out by now. The election will happen here, not there. Probably not the Presidential election of 2004. Perhaps one of our goals for the DNC is to smoke out innovative uses of the Internet by Democrats, where they're doing more than raise money for TV ads. Put that one on the list for sure.  

On the other hand, why aren't the Dems making more hay with this picture? If it were the other way around, and Kerry had Der Feurher sieg heiling on his main website, you can be sure that the Reps would be all over it. Come on guys, you gotta fight if you want to win. 

If you're going to blog the convention, please post a comment here. 

Taegan Goddard, one of my favorite political bloggers, writes to say that he's going to be at the DNC as well. Now I want to know who else will be there. This should be excellent.  

As you might expect, we're hearing about it on the blogs. Jay Rosen of NYU got his credentials. Very good choice. So far they've picked at least three people who have enough independence to offer some perspective on the event. They didn't just accept political operatives. Goddard is a good choice because he doesn't spin, he's just curious about what's going on and passes along what he learns. Rosen has a free and creative mind when it comes to what's possible in citizen journalism. His essay on the convention is long, and insightful. 

Reuters: MP3 Blogs Serve Rare Songs. 

Scott Rosenberg: "Individual consumers want to buy their music and then do whatever they want with it: Put it on an iPod, put it in the car, burn new CD mixes, share with friends. It's what we've always done with our music, after all; we just have better tools today." 

Dan Gillmor is on the front line in the battle against comment spam.  

Paul Boutin: "Are you saying there were 100,000 clickthroughs to Dave's blog from one MSN article?"  

Lance Knobel on the naming of the Freedom Tower which will replace the World Trade Center at Ground Zero. I still think it's a bad idea. Better to leave it as open space, a nice park, maybe a housing co-op, a few restaurants, a church, a temple, a mosque, anything but a skyscraper. Haven't they heard of Murphy's Law? Would you work in that skyscraper? I wouldn't go near it.  

Henry Jenkins: "Within minutes of the Kerry announcement, the Republican National Committee put on its website a detailed set of talking points about Edwards." 

There hasn't been enough of a response to the call for a Thursday meeting in NYC, so maybe we'll do it next week. I'm pretty sure I'll be here then.  

Wired: "Gracenote has quietly become one of the most powerful companies in digital music -- but many of its users have probably never heard of it." 

One year after Bray's brilliant tactic 

Paul Boutin notes, as I did, that MSN readers are uniformly polite and informative. Then I read a brief post from Tim Bray, who has been the opposite to me in the past, and he says he's seen the growth that is going on today in the weblog world, in the Web, ten years ago. This reminds me that Tim compared my contribution to that of Charles Goldfarb, the inventor of SGML, in a totally condescending post last year, and ignited a flamewar, and that's been his major contribution to this space, as far as I'm concerned.

I tried to explain to Tim then (not that he was listening of course) that RSS was just part of the picture, and to see it only as an XML format was to miss the point, that there were applications on both sides of RSS, content management software and aggregators, and lots of people, that made it really work. To think you could swap out the format was as silly as thinking you could swap out HTML or HTTP in 1994. Yet that is exactly what Tim and his colleagues tried to do. If instead there were a pause for thought, just a tiny bit of respect to balance the bluster, he could have saved a bunch of time and effort. He still could.

Steve Gillmor tagged Bray then as a master tactician, I guess so, but at least a little strategy should be behind every tactic. It's still not too late to get back on course Tim, I'll accept your retraction when you make it, but so far, that hasn't happened.

Like so many others, you came to conquer, and failed. Now what?

New versions in fifteen minutes 

I once did a game project for Children's Television Workshop in 1980-something. I'm not a game designer. But they gave me a great one to work with. I coded up the prototype, he played with it, he gave me instant feedback, I tweaked the app, gave him the new one. We'd turn around new versions in fifteen minutes. It came out great. It was relaxing to just be the programmer. And I made a good money from that job. Moral of the story: Sometimes you do the best work when someone else provides the passion.

Golden Rule before Cluetrain 

Yesterday, an absolutely gorgeous NY summer day, I took my walk with my iPod and Doc Searls.

There were two parts to the conversation, the first, a narrative biography about Doc, which was very useful, I didn't know how he came to be in Silicon Valley for example. The second half was fairly predictable Doc hype, open source and Microsoft ad infinitum, as if that was all there was in the software world, with a new rant about how SCO was screwing with Doc's life, something I could relate to, because my own life is being screwed with.

A short comment stuck with me. Doc said of fellow Cluetrainer, Chris Locke and his alter-id, Rageboy: "The most out-there and purposely offensive blog. He's a genius, it's brilliant stuff. It's hostile." Then he laughs.

I've heard him say this before, and I've also heard David Weinberger say the same thing. They find Locke's cruelty amusing. I agree that Locke's site is purposely offensive, I might go a little further, but I wonder if Searls and Weinberger would like it so much if they were the targets?

Locke directs his hostility at people. I watched as he humiliated an old girlfriend. How does he get away with this? I wondered. People still seem to be his friend. I didn't say anything for fear that he'd go after me. Then he did. How did I offend him? I honestly don't know.

The Golden Rule comes before The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you aren't trying to treat people as you would like to be treated, you can't possibly do good, imho. You guys have taken a big detour, I think you've lost your way. When I first read the Cluetrain I was cheering, it was exciting. Now it's degraded and sick. Time for an intervention. Wake up guys, people matter. I still believe you're better than this. Much.

Postscript: Searls says he agrees, but only with bedtime-story part. Someday perhaps Locke will turn on him or Weinberger. What happens then will surely be interesting to watch.