Monday, July 26, 2004

Good night. See y'all tomorrow, bright and early! 

NY Times: "The Republicans have temporarily transplanted their 'war room' to a bunker just two blocks from the FleetCenter." 

Reviews of the Gore speech: NewsHounds, Salon, NY Times. 

They're giving out these cool blogger visors. 

Michele Catalano of Command-Post is credentialed for the RNC. I'm jealous! I want to be there.  

I'm being interviewed by CNN right now, Jeff Greenfield, and they want a shot of me typing something into my weblog.  

Hey they really like Hillary Clinton here. The NY delegation is waving NY heart Hillary signs. 

Jim Moore stopped by the blogger's desk for a portrait. That's Matt Stoller in the foreground. If you're in the neighborhood we're in section 319-20 on the 7th floor. Happy to do portrait photography. Don't expect great conversation. During the less interesting speeches I'm listening to music on iTunes, and sometimes I have much better background music than everyone else. I've got a great Tears For Fears song playing right now. Followed by Blondie singing Heart of Glass. We bloggers make our own entertainment. Then the Dems crank up a great tune, I Am Everyday People. Which is consistent with the blogging theme, which is We're Just Folks, Come As You Are. "Different strokes for different folks." Yeah. "We gotta live together." 

Al Gore just gave a kickass speech. Full of good vibe and reasoning.  

Talkleft: "And the no longer anonymous Atrios is here!" 

Hearing that I got out of my seat, introduced myself to the Talkleft blogger (she said on her blog that she's sitting next to David Sifry who I know, of course), she pointed out Atrios, I asked if I could take his picture, and he said yes. Now there officially has been news at the DNC. The uncloaking of a blogging super-hero.  

Reuters picks a good quote off Scripting News.  

Reinvented: What are the bloggers browsing? 

By 7:30PM the floor is full, people are posed for a picture. Then they play Dancing in the Streets and We Are Family, and it becomes a dance floor. We're weaving and humming up on the 7th floor too.  

Convention Bloggers has had 30K hits today. Not bad for a site that didn't exist three days ago. 

Jim Moore: "These jets come out of the North American Defense Command, but are now under the direct control of the Secret Service." 

New header graphic to go with the current locale. 

Daniel Berlinger asks for a colophon of tools convention bloggers are using. Answer, for the most, they're using their normal laptops. I'm using my ThinkPad. Other stuff: The new Nikon Coolpix, USB cable for the camera, two mikes, two headphones, a Radio Shack line splitter (so I can plug in two mikes at once, but it doesn't work), a power strip, USB mouse, cell phone, business cards, and that's about it. I deliberately emptied my backback this morning, a dry-run yesterday proved I was carrying too much weight, no need to bring the iPod (my laptop has iTunes and all the music on the iPod). Don't need my crossword book, or my passport or checkbook and all the other miscellaneous michegas that's accumulated in my knapsack. Amazing how much weight all that adds up to. (PS to Adam, I got a big heavy-duty mike from Radio Shack.) 

Well, the convention has started. It's boring beyond belief. It can only get better. Everyone on the floor is mulling around, chatting. Can't understand what the speakers are saying. It sounds like this: blah blah blah John Kerry blah blah Kerry Edwards blah blah values values values blah blah John Kerry blah blah blah standing at a crossroads blah blah. There's a din in the room. I had to go get a Dunkin Donuts iced coffee to stay away. Zzzzz. Blah blah K-E-R-R-Y blah blah Kerry Edwards and you. Thank you very much. 

Some big news. My picture is on John Kerry's blog. Hey I'm smiling.  

BBC: "A computer virus appears to have hit net search engine, Google, crippling its search service." 

News.Com: "Major Internet search engines were crippled Monday morning by a variant of the MyDoom worm, rendering Google inaccessible to many users and slowing results from Yahoo." 

NY Times: "The popular Internet search company, which is planning to sell shares to the public in an unconventional auction, said today it expected its shares to sell for $108 to $135 each." 

Today's audio blog post includes an interview with Matt Gross, formerly of Dean For America, and now chief blogger for North Carolina Senate candidate Erskine Bowles. 

Matt Gross has a picture of me blogging in the Fleet.  

We just got a paper copy of the National Journal Hotline. Very interesting crib sheet on the news of the day from the Washington perspective. They're also on the Web.  

Pictures from the blogger's breakfast in Boston. 

WBUR: Bloggers in the Bullpen. 

Barack Obama, who's running for the Senate in Illinois, spoke briefly at the Blogger's Breakfast. He's an up and coming star of the Democratic Party, according to David Weinberger, he'll be President in 12 years. 

Patti Labelle just came on to do an equipment check. She's just awesome. There are bloggers all around me on the blvd, the connectivity kind of sucks, I'm the lucky one, I've got a line. Behind me Dave Weinberger says "I've got no signal." 

I'm back from the blogger's breakfast, in the convention center, seated at a great desk on something called Blogger Boulevard. The breakfast speakers were Walter Mears, an ancient AP reporter who came out of retirement to do a blog of the convention, and then Howard Dean, who talked about how blogs were really important to the future of politics. There were two dozen print, radio and television reporters there, checking us out. I think we did pretty well.  

Adam Curry: "If Dave had been working for a radio broadcast organization, and filed this report he would've been looking for a new job within 5 minutes." 

Convention Bloggers is #1 on Blogdex and Daypop. Excellent. The aggregate picture is important, it helps people find what the bloggers are doing, as opposed to the head-pats from the bigpubs. And it helps the bloggers find new readers. Win-win. 

Command Post has the DNC schedule of events that are open to press. 

The official word on WiFi from Mike Liddell at the DNC. 

WSJ: Meet the Bloggers. 

BBC: Bloggers go mainstream at US conventions. 

NY Times: Year of the Blog? 

Josh Marshall: "The whole thing is mystifying to me." 

Morning pre-coffee notes 

Setting the scene over at the Fleet, we're way up high, in section 319 on the seventh floor. There's a section of seats that have been cleared out for the bloggers. We're told there will be tables and chairs so we can update from there. There is ample power, I brought a power strip. Last night Matt Stoller called to say that they had gotten the WiFi working. That's good.

This is the view of the stage from our space.

Right behind us, within touching distance is CNN's blogger booth. Not sure what they have planned there, I wish they weren't quite so close. I mean are they going to let bloggers hang out in their studio? I guess this is what you get when you aren't paying for the space.

This morning at 10AM is the official bloggers breakfast. From there we'll shuttle over to Fleet, wait in a huge line, go through security again, and then go upstairs to get set up, hopefully fully powered, with wifi.

Shea Staduim 

A picture of Shea Stadium from an airplane yesterday as we were taking off from LaGuardia Airport.