The public convention blogs aggregator set up by Dave Winer crushed the competition on daypop and blogdex yesterday and today, reportedly with over 40,000 hits. Not remotely surprising to those who believe that the future is in RSS.
It’s the opening of convention week here in Boston. For political junkies, this is nirvana. The mood is very upbeat, the sun is shining, security is high but the traffic unbelievably light, and there are lots of places to buy your Kerry-Edwards buttons. And the Red Sox even won last night.
Jim Moore blogged a Berkman Center planning meeting that we held earlier in the day at the Harvard Club on the role of the internet in politics. Our goal is to work toward a conference in December (i.e., after this election) that takes a hard, skeptical look at what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in terms of those using the internet to transform the political system in the US and around the world. We had a tremendous group of people: in addition to Jim and several others from the Berkman Center (including Andrew McLaughlin, now at Google), we were joined by a team from eBay, which is sponsoring the conference; Joe Trippi; Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren; Zach Exley and Dick Bell from the Kerry campaign; Chris Gabrieli, of Mass2020, Celebrate Boston ‘04, and countless other good works; Matt Wood of Win Back Respect; and other all-stars. If you’re interested in being kept apprised of developments related to this conference, please sign up here. We’ll also have a planning meeting at the RNC convention in New York and another one on the Harvard campus in the early fall.
The revolution may not get televised, but the convention is certainly getting blogged. David Weinberger, one of credentialled bloggers on the convention floor, writing at boston.com, tells us that, so far, it’s “very, very boring. But only if you’re paying attention.” Dave Winer goes a bit further: “boring beyond belief.” (Maybe this great crowd of bloggers will regret going to the trouble of getting credentials after all that! I doubt it.) The Kerry-Edwards blog has Dave featured in color – even wearing a blazer, it appears.
There’s also quite a frenzy in the mainstream press to cover the blogging of the event. The coverage tends to put the bloggers at the “margins.” Or in the bullpen. With a meet-and-greet at WSJ. Yahoo! is running a Reuters round-up piece with perhaps the most bullish sentiment: ”Hopes were high the bloggers would present a dynamic, irreverent, cutting new voice, reaching a vast online audience that the regular media cannot communicate with.” Most coverage keeps blogs away from center-stage, but part of the story; largely a story unto them-(our-)selves.
Perhaps best of all, Dave Winer has created an aggregator for convention bloggers so you can check out all the action.
It’s not a new idea, but it is a good one and bears repeating, by Susan Mernit, via Larry Lessig: news outlets ought to embed Creative Commons licenses in the newsfeeds that increasingly deliver their news.
A week or so ago, Larry Harris and I wrote an op-ed for the Boston Globe
about young Bostonians taking up the job of active citizenship.
Our piece
was meant, in part, to celebrate the very large numbers of young people
engaged in public service activities in Boston.
But we also
sought to draw attention to a very real problem facing our
country. We decried
the apathy and disengagement of many of our young colleagues in the
political process — reaching a low-water-mark in the election of 2000,
in which fewer than a third of young voters went to the polls. We
suggested that the spirit behind the high rate of public service,
combined with a Bostonian ethos of social entrepreneurship and
fueled by internet organizing tools, might help to reverse this alarming trend.
Two leaders of the Massachusetts Young Democrats, Libby de Vecchi and David Howard, replied with a
critique, by way of a letter to
the editor of the Globe. Most important, I’m grateful that
anyone read our op-ed, much less bothered to reply in writing.
That’s certainly a good thing. And it speaks to whatever that
thing is in the water that makes Boston such a haven for political
junkies.
A few things that they wrote in their letter merited further
discussion, in my view. First, de Vecchi and Howard seem to
suggest that we were not sufficiently focused on encouraging engagement
in the political arena itself. Nothing could be farther from the
truth, at least as I meant it. The whole point was that, while
there are things to celebrate about young Bostonians getting involved
in public service, we’ve got a lot of work to do in terms of getting
young people back in the political mix. It’s that gap between the
soup kitchen and the polling place that we’ve got to focus on bridging.
Second, I sensed that our respondents felt we were critiquing those
who are working hard in Massachusetts to organize young people in the
political process. Again, quite the contrary. Our call to
action is not to the relatively few who are engaged in politics, but
rather the relatively many who have written it off. I, too, have
managed political campaigns, knocked on doors, held signs, run for
delegate, been up to New Hampshire in primary season, and the like — I
wish I had more time to do more of it, and find it incredibly
energizing and fun. My hat is off to those who have chosen a
career path in the public service through politics. More people
ought to heed de Vecchi and Howard’s good example. And return
their phone calls when they reach out.
Third, our respondents mislead the reader by implying that we are
pointing to the internet as the sole solution to the apathy
problem. Again, this is far from what I had in mind. What
I’ve been working on at the Berkman Center, in no small part, is trying
to understand where the net has worked to improve democracy and where
it has fallen short of that promise. Our take on this question is
a skeptical one. In no context is the net a magic bullet.
There’s always an in-person dynamic that matters. Almost nothing
that’s truly an internet pure play has worked. But there is great
promise in innovations both simple and not-so-simple: e-mail,
list-servs, moveon, meetup, weblogs, RSS, and even some fancier
stuff. The best strategy for a campaign, in my view, is a
combination of classical (the ordinary blocking-and-tackling of
campaigning) and jazz (the experimentation with cool, fun, innovative
tools), to borrow a phrase from one-time lieutenant governor nominee
Bob Massie. It’s part of what explains the Kerry victory over
Dean in the primary, I think.
Howard and de Vecchi end their letter by saying: “Young people who
care about the future of this country should get involved directly in
political parties at the local and state level in addition to general
community service.” Again, I couldn’t agree more.
BTW, we are planning a conference on this general topic on December 10, 2004.
The non-partisan Campaign Institute, which will train a new generation of campaign staffers, is holding its first two courses here in Cambridge, MA, in August. They apparently have a few spots left. The list of trainers and participating organizations looks first-rate. It’s a “crash course in changing America.” I like it already.
The Chairman’s Report of last week’s ITU WSIS Thematic Meeting on Countering Spam, which is a summary of proceedings from the 3-day affair, is now posted to the ITU’s quite rich web site on spam. The Chairman’s Report, officially by Robert Horton of Australia, is meant to reflect what was said at the meeting, rather than any formal resolution of the group, but my sense is that there was fairly broad support for the content in the report as it was discussed in the final session.
A good discussion underway at Crooked Timber on the history and future of American civil society. I’ve always been puzzled by what the proper role of civil society ought to be in 1) a democracy and 2) global institutions like the UN. I know it has an important role, but it’s a tricky question as to how the structuring and the mode of input ought to work.
What was previously known as Safer Together ‘04 is now Win Back Respect. Still the same clever writing to their weblog (”new name, same great product”?) They’ve gotten some good press in the UK.
I like the blog-like First Read from MSNBC on election-related news. The entries are quick to read and point to further reading elsewhere — including outside of the MSNBC universe. Something of a politics-focused version of Slate’s historically excellent Today’s Papers, with somewhat broader reach in terms of news sources.
If you’d like to talk weblogs today on the radio, Here on Earth is running a live radio show right now regarding weblogs (it’s Sunday, July 11) from 3:00 - 4:00 p.m. EST. You can call in at 800-642-1234 (in US and Canada), or 1-608-263-1890 (other countries). The host is Jean Feraca, based at Wisconsin Public Radio. You can e-mail them, too, at hereonearth@wpr.org. Also on the show: Ann Althouse of University of Wisconsin law school.
