Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Discussion of blogging in presidential campaigns led by Dan Gillmor:

1. Zephyr Teachout, Dean blogger: “There were 3 audiences [for the
   Dean blogs]. One was the press. One was the activist audience. One was
   the audience of the campaign itself.”
2. Cameron Barrett: “The
   Clark campaign scratched the whole concept of the single blog–because
   that wasn’t going to scale. We wanted a community of blogs instead of 1
   blog with 100,000 comments. We wanted an architecture that would let
   people have structured conversations.”
3. Dick
   Bell, Kerry blogger: “We needed a front-end that could cope with an
   adversarial environment–we built it ourselves, because we had to deal
   with a lot of trolls.”
4. Jim Moore: “A lot of people are still not on the web. When
   the service employees union endorsed Dean, we thought we were going to
   get lots of email addresses. They have 1.1 million members, but only
   10,000 email addresses.”
5. Dave Winer: “In the end, it wasn’t Dean’s opponents that
   beat you, it was CNN that beat you. If the Dean campaign had had a
   rival network to get out their image of that speech, they might have
   won, and we all might have won.”
6.  Matt Gross, Dean blogger: “We pushed
   staffers to blog. When people pushed for Dean to blog, the reality was
   that if posts had been signed by Dean they would have been written by
   Matt Gross. Kate O’Connor’s posts on deanforamerica
   were like the Lifetime section of your newspaper. Zephyr’s were the
   organizing section. Matt Gross was the Walter Cronkite.” [laughter and
   applause]
7. Dick Bell: “Political consultants always tend to be
   looking in the rearview mirror. Whatever the big thing was last time,
   you see a whole lot more of that next time.”
8. Dave Winer: “None of you guys get it. We are not voters. We are
   taxpayers. We go to work. We die in those wars. We are not eyeballs. We
   are not at the bottom and you are not at the top. Example, Channel 9 at
   Microsoft. By giving engineers inside Microsoft a chance to be seen by
   people outside, it changes the engineers’ “world.”Blogs are changing the world.”
9. Oliver
   Willis: “Citizens want to be marketed to. What campaign blogs look
   like: ‘Here are some pictures, the other guy sucks, vote for me.’ “
10. Hossein Derakhshan (aka Hoder), Iranian blogger [in IRC]: “Blog is words and TV is images. As an
    outsider, I see that many people in America can more easily be driven
    by images than words, like most other people in the modern world. Dean
    didn’t have an image, he had lots of words. This is exactly why
    Al-Jazeera is really frightening: it’s using image against image.”

For more: Bryan Strawser, Jeff Sandquist, and Lenn Pryor all blogged this session, with intriguingly different points of view.