Friday, July 30, 2004

Essay: What the bloggers should have done at the DNC. 

Google's IPO bidding site is live. Does that mean the IPO process has started? 

Oy I'm dealing with another round of spyware. Sometimes this stuff is amazingly insightful. Click on a link, up pops "Do you think marijuana should be legal, yes or no?" I don't dare click on that baby for fear of what will pop up. (FYI, the answer is yes, of course. Something like one-third of the people in prison are there for marijuana offenses. That's just ridiculous.) But get this I had clicked on the link to a blog whose author is certain to be a stoner. How did they know? And how do I get rid of these. I've run Spybot, Adaware, countless times. Updated Windows. Yeah I know, switch to a Mac. Use Firefox. But what does Microsoft, with all its fancy patents, think I should do? Hey now that we're friends, what does the DNC think?? 

Okay, let's critique one of the critiques. He didn't give us a list of blogs he read so we could see if his judgment was based on breadth, or maybe he was just too lazy, or picky, to find the good stuff.  

Heard in the airport lounge: "I haven't eaten a vegetable in a week." 

Rogers Cadenhead: "Weblogs represent a mass consumer revolt against the giant electronic media and the bottom-line fixated, risk-averse, synergy-loving infotainment cesspool that it has become." 

Michael Feldman has a two-word message for his media friends. 

Jim Moore, not just a talking head, calls Kerry's speech a home run. 

Okay reporters say the bloggers didn't break any news. I wonder if they read Micah Sifry's report on the money behind the Democrats that was hidden in plain sight. For a brush-up on how the mind works, try Don's Amazing Puzzle. It's amazing because it so clearly illustrates how your mind mostly sees what it expects to see.  

The job of a blogger is to stay steady even when they say you're stupid, unqualified, inexperienced, irrelevant, biased or self-obsessed. Maybe even report on them saying it. Let the reader draw his or her own conclusion as to why they do this. I have a lot of training, because people in the tech blogging world say all these things about me, and have been doing so for years. In the end it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. My flow keeps going up, I keep getting better at what I do, and there's always more juicy bits to point to.  

I'm at Boston's Logan Airport, using their WiFi. It's $6.95 for 24 hours of access. Two major irritations at modern airports I always forget to mention (because I rarely blog in airports I guess). First, people sitting behind you in the waiting area talking on their cell phones, saying very mundane personal things that I really didn't want to know, at full volume. I guess the conversations are especially irritating because you can only hear one side. You wonder if the person at the other end is really interested, or is as irritated as you are. The second thing that bothers me is how you get separated from your wallet as you go through the screening. There it is, sitting out in the open, waiting for anyone to pick it up. The guy in front of me complained about his $6000 Rolex watch being so vulnerable, so they went and got it for him. I mumbled my wallet is worth more than $6000 to an identity thief. Did they get it? Nahhh. This goes along somewhat with the lax security at Fleet, where people got in without any kind of matchup between their ticket and their ID. I'm not any kind of security expert, but I think we got off easy this week.  

An observer noted that I tend to write Flint Center when I really mean Fleet Center. The former is the place where Apple Computer did its famous rollout of the Macintosh in 1984, an event surely as memorable as this year's DNC. Let history record that Fleet Center (whose name is likely to change now that Fleet Bank has merged with BofA) was where the 2004 Democratic National Convention was held.  

Casting note. CNN's Tucker Carlson could play Young Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs, The Movie. No doubt this will be the bit everyone quotes from today's Scripting News. 

Steve Rubel interviews convention blogger Matt Stoller. 

Charles Cooper: "Most of the credentialed bloggers came off like cyberhayseeds in the big city." 

Cooper quoted Rick Heller, without linking to the post he was quoting. Heller responds. 

Something I noticed too. There's a lack of discipline among the pros which has deformed discourse in all areas including science, technology, economics, medicine (areas where accuracy really counts). The practice of quoting out of context, if you don't want to be made to look like a fool, turns opinions into mush. I got quoted out of context quite a few times this week, I knew it would happen when I posted the item about how boring the convention was on Monday. I published the bit anyway, because communicating with my readers is more important to me than potentially being made to look like an idiot by professional reporters. This is something I'd like them to look at. If you're really an idealist (and many pros are) you have no choice but to try to convey the meaning of the people you quote. To do otherwise would violate rule #2, saying something you know is not true. 

Paul Krugman: "Somewhere along the line, TV news stopped reporting on candidates' policies, and turned instead to trivia." 

Lance Knobel: Security 101 and the DNC. 

Orange Mike, who made an appearance on Convention Bloggers on Wednesday, appears mysteriously in a Time photo-essay on the DNC. 

Wired reviews The Manchurian Candidate, which appears to be must-see.