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

Presidential politics and weblogs

Moderator: Dave Winer, Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, Harvard Law School.

Participants:
1. Matthew Gross, Howard Dean campaign.

2. Joe Jones, Bob Graham campaign.

3. Cameron Barrett, Wesley Clark campaign.

4. Eric Folley, Democratic National Committee blog Kicking Ass.

• Matthew Gross: I came to this thinking of a blogger as someone who had a weblog. Then we started the Dean weblog, and people writing in the comments were referring to themselves as bloggers. At first I thought, they’ve got the terminology wrong, and then I realized being a blogger is in how you define yourself.
• Dave Winer: Well, I know I was a blogger long before I started writing in reverse chronological order.
• Eric Folley: There are 18 people able to post on the weblog. To post a story, you circulate it to all 18, and if you get a majority of “yeses”, it gets posted. If Legal says no, the story is breaking the law, it doesn’t get posted. The only other rule is that iCommunications or Resources has to be one of the yeses–they’re our fact checkers. How many stories have been rejected? Zero.
• Cameron Barrett: I see my job as first blogger as a go-between connecting supporters who read the blog with the campaign itself. I read all the comments we get. We gathered comments after Clark’s first speech, what people said he could have done better, andwe sent that information to the speech writers.
• Joe Jones: The average Joe on the street doesn’t care about policy. Graham has the best policy of anyone and he’s at the bottom of the poll.
• Matt Gross: We collect all that information, the comments, whether it’s on policy or “Howard Dean needs to wear a looser collar.” Before weblogs, you could send a comment to a campaign–send an email, or write a letter–and the person who would decide what happened to that suggestion would be the lowest staffer, the one who opened the mail.
• Matt Gross: If you don’t engage in that online idea exchange, all you have is reverse chronological order press releases.
• Eric Folley: We studied carefully what Republicans did on the web in 2000. They didn’t use the web to inform voters, they used it to get people angry. They were sending out regular emails to supporters aimed at getting them angry with Democrats. Our audience is pretty much our base. The most effective audience we can go after is committed Democrats.
• Matt Gross: We don’t delete if a Kerry supporter comes over and argues. That’s democracy. One of the things our supporters did to discourage “trolls”–people who try to be disruptive, post obscenities–was to respond troll posts with $10 donations to Dean. This is not what a troll wants to see, so it does discourage them.
• Matt Gross: DeanForAmerica is not a candidate’s weblog, it’s a campaign weblog. One of the things about blogging is that it really has to be authentic. That’s why Howard Dean doesn’t blog often and he doesn’t blog much–because when he does, that’s really his writing. You know if you get a letter in the mail signed by Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton didn’t really write that letter. If you want a president who has a weblog, you’re going to get a weblog by a ghostwriter.
• Eric Folley: It’s up to these guys to compete in the primary, and it’s up to the DNC to raise as much money as we can. Once we have a nominee, it’s the job of the candidate to get out the message. The job of the party is to get people to the polls.
• Jim Moore: The Democratic model seems to be that government is like a nurturing mother. The Republican model is that government is like a stern father. My position is that I don’t want government to be my parent.
• Josh Marshall: I find myself here defending all the presidential candidates. I hear people asking why the candidates don’t take time to blog every day, to answer individual questions. I don’t think you have any idea how busy a presidential candidate is.
• Phil Wolff: There is a digital divide. I live in Oakland, California and when I go to the Meetups for Kerry or Dean, they’re all white. To reach out across the digital divide, you’re going to need money–traditional campaign tools–people reaching out into the community.*

* Several people said that no candidates were spending enough time on the web. Candidates should blog in person. Candidates should answer questions online just the way they answer questions for the press. Candidates shouldn’t raise money on the web and spend it on TV ads.

I love my web-brothers and web-sisters, but face it we’re mostly white and even more mostly middle-class. I want my candidate (Dean, if you don’t know) to reach out to the other 98% of the electorate, to share his excitement and views as broadly as possible. To do that he needs money–and when I donated money over the web I sure didn’t mean for Dean to go plowing the money back into “the web.” I wanted my money to help Dean become president.

End rant, I’m beat, skipping the cocktail party to catch some zzz, then on to have dinner with Halley at Dali’s.

Cluetrain 2003

Moderator: Christopher Lydon, Berkman Center

Panelists:
Elizabeth Spiers, NY Magazine–formerly Gawker but now TheKicker
Doc Searls, Linux Journal
Jim Moore, Berkman Center
Adam Curry, United Resources of Jamby

• Adam Curry: When you talk about what people are doing with the web now, think about the way the telephone was used when it was new–to call ahead and tell you that a telegram is on the way.
• Elizabeth Spiers: People talk about “the web”, “the weblogs”–from my point of view, the web is incredibly granular.
• Adam Curry: I wake up in the morning and the latest Chris Lydon interview in on my iPod. I didn’t have to do anything, I didn’t have to understand how it got there. I call it a kind of reverse Tivo.
• Chris Lydon: I’ve drunk so much of Dave Winer’s weblog Koolaid now, I get dizzy.
• Jim Moore: What we need is not so much Smart Mobs as wise mobs. The collective wisdom of the second superpower gives us that possibility.
• Doc Searls: The only recourse people had in 1974 (in the movie Network) was to go to the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”–but they were yelling in complete impotence.
• Esther Dyson: What happens when blogging becomes genuinely democratic? What happens when not just the people in this room are blogging, but people outside this room–all kinds of people?
• Elizabeth Spiers: As the blogosphere increases, you have the problems of figuring out who’s good. And there’s a technical problem of how you find good new sources.
• Kevin Marks: Bloggers tend to correct their mistakes a lot faster than newspapers do. It’s kind of an asymptotic approach to the truth.
• David Weinberger: Weblogs have finally killed the myth of objectivity. We’ve known for a long time that objectivity is impossible–it would be like the art of seeing the world as if nobody is looking at it. Truth is a property of the net itself.
• Ted Henderson: People have compared weblogs to the telephone. I don’t know many people, except maybe teenagers, who pick up the telephone and dial random numbers to get their message out.
• Henry Copeland, blogads.com: People here talk about how great it is for weblogs to kill the gatekeeper. A lot of people think the gatekeeper is liberal, and a lot of weblogs are conservative. So I don’t think you should
• Adam Curry: The discussion today has been very US-centric. We talk about big media as big US media–we talk about Iraq, and Washington politics. That’s not what blogs in Europe are talking about.
• Kevin Marks: The net is too big for us to see all of it. It’s like Caliban’s mirror, because you see what you’re loooking for. If you look for dark things you’ll see dark things.
• Kevin Marks: The net changes the power law of the media curve. If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power curve that goes all the way down gradually, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single click. If you look at popularity in the “real” world–best-selling books, or top music–the power curve drops like a stone from a very high level. That’s because in order to get a book published, or a piece of music recorded, you have to convince somebody that you’re going to sell a million copies. You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.
• Jay Rosen: There are no masses, there are just ways of seeing people as masses.

You can get links to pages of speakers I missed from the blogroll at BloggerCon.

• Len Apcar, NYT editor: Nick Kristof’s work for the New York Times is essentially like a weblog.
• Len Apcar: I don’t think we would get into proprietary processes–how we make up the front page, for example, or how a tip becomes a story–on a day by day basis. Do we have visitors come into the page one meeting in New York? Yes. Do we talk about this stuff ad nauseam to journalism classes? Yes. But we’re not ready to see it daily in a blog.
• James Taranto, WSJ Opinion Journal editor: The Trent Lott story, which Josh Marshall was instrumental in bringing out, really got rolling in the weblogs. But I don’t think the story would have gone as far as it did unless the big media got the story and started digging into it.
• James Taranto: What happened in the Raines situation was not that bloggers like Andrew Sullivan forced the hand of the New York Times. It was that people inside the NYT started using Romanesko’s page as a bulletin board to post their frustrations.

• Dave Weinberger, JOHO: Is it the opinion of the panel that weblogging is a life skill, and everyone should learn it? Or is it like singing, that not everybody should do it in public?
• Pat Delaney, Homo Ludens: Yes, there is universal access to the internet for students who live in districts with good web connections and capable tech support. That shuts out many, many kids in urban districts.
• AKMA Disseminary: MIT’s open courseware is not a blog–but it’s a way of dismantling the institutional structure of education. For example, it breaks the structure that says you can only learn between September and June, you can only learn in a classroom watching a teacher.
• Britt Blaser: Blogging is new. I think we need to celebrate the advances rather than complaining that we aren’t there yet.
• Pat Delaney: I think there’s someplace where we can be strident–and that’s the question of equity. We can do it if people push for the commons to support it.
• Kevin Marks, Epeus Epigone: Blogging is not selective by race, it’s selective by electricity. Also, you can’t really blog if you haven’t mastered the basic skills of reading and writing.
• Pat Delaney: Blogging has worked well for my school, but we have an unusual situation. Usually, system admins, designers, and teachers do not like to talk to each other.

• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: People who won’t link because they don’t want to lose traffic to another page are operating on the Ted Baxter model. Ted didn’t want them to hire a replacement newscaster while he went on vacation in case people might like the replacement better. “Aw c’mon, just do reruns of my old shows, the news doesn’t change that much.”
• Josh Marshall, TalkingPointsMemo: When you have a story as a journalist, you’re waiting for approval to publish it, then somebody else scoops you, by getting the same story out before you do.
• Scott Rosenberg, Salon: They can no longer have a “closed” meeting of shareholders with no press–because every shareholder could be a blogger. They can’t close down the news from Iraq because Salam Pax is there.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: If you’re a journalist with a blog, how do you make sure your blog doesn’t cannibalize your day job. How do you make sure your mistress isn’t getting all your best stuff, with your wife getting what’s left over?
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: As long as you don’t get paid for what you write, you can get libel coverage on your homeowner’s policy.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: I do feel that Ziff Davis owns that little bit of my soul–or at least rents it.
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: I think you have a responsibility to opine honestly–I don’t think you have a responsibility to have an opinion.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: It’s not the nineties, so I won’t phrase the question as “How do you plan to monetize those eyeballs?”
• Lis Riba: We’re seeing a bunch of people used to writing monologues trying to have a dialogue…
• Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit: I think there’s a critical level after which comments don’t work very well–it deteriorates into a chat board or UseNet.
• Kevin Marks, Epeus Epigone: The question is who can speak when. With weblogs, everyone can speak at once, in parallel. Prisoner’s dilemma–the weblog gives you a motive to be trustworthy.*
• Jay Rosen, PressThink, chair of journalism dept at NYU. Readers, or people we call readers–are now writers. When I click on the source of a comment on my weblog, I end up in a website. I don’t think we know what journalism is going to be like in a world where readers are also writers.
• Ed Cone, EdCone.com: I think today is going to be the ultimate Rashomon experience. I think we’re goin g to find out when we get back to our hotel rooms that we all felt the elephant.

* A special huge thank you to Kevin Marks, who did what Harvard University could not–got us a working WiFi connection.

Big room in Harvard law school. Picture on the wall of Rosa Parks integrating that bus.

Forgive me for this comparison, but–we aim at our own small upset of the balance of power here. In a world where web publishing is easy, fast, and widespread–in a world of weblogs–the big guys lose the power to decide which stories get spread around and which get buried.

OK, I admit it, probably too much coffee this morning.

I love sitting here looking at people whose lives I know from their weblogs.

Inside gossip, you heard it here first:

• Dave Winer has a great haircut–one of the few beard-trims I’ve ever seen that doesn’t make the wearer look like one of those cute little furry Star Wars creatures.
• Scott Johnson is running Linux and performing prodigies of high-tech stuff as we wait for the main event.
• Frank Paynter is snapping still photos.
• Wow, Oliver Willis just showed up! He looks like his pictures.

You read it here first–oh, no, wait, you probably didn’t, because the web connection busted for a while.

When the BloggerCon registration form asked for an entry in the field “Organization”, my gut response was “What????
If I were organized, would I have a blog?”*

Within nano-seconds, I filled that field with “Disorganized Blogworld”–whose anti-Organization describing my loyalties well.

Imagine my surprise and pleasure when I read the latest Bloggercon blogroll–my friend Shutterclog Niek is not only there, he’s there from “Disorganized Blogworld”.

* A blog bogs you down–that’s why organized people don’t blog. Instead, like an attack dog, organized people go whole hog on non-blog dialogue that lets them leapfrog competitors groggy from last night’s blog.

Organized people may jog, or send their kids to a fancy pedagogue, even breakfast on hair of the dog–but they don’t blog.
They leave blogs to folks like me and Shutterclog. [End rap video here, please–I don’t have enough guns or bling-bling to continue.]

Most things grow best in particular kinds of places. Crocus bulbs don’t flourish in Dixie rivers–baby crocs don’t enjoy cold Yankee gardens.

Creativity? Well, the answers aren’t so clear….

The exhibit “Cultures of Creativity” at Stockholm’s Nobel Museum features films on a bunch of environments where Nobel laureates and other creators flourished–Paris cafés in the 1920s–the colleges of Cambridge–Berkeley–Basel–Budapest….

The funny thing is how much every one of these places reminds you of blogging:

• “Informal meeting places for spontaneous, unplanned discussions”–a nice description of blogging, don’t you think?
• Enough colleagues to inspire you, but a world small enough that your own efforts can be heard.
• Real feedback, including real criticism, helps even newbies steer clear of obvious bullshit.
• Time and space to think and re-think your ideas.

So, what am I hoping to get out of BloggerCon? (Aside from the pleasures of actual F2F visits.) Ideas to make our blogging ecosystem even more fruitful–for us and for people who haven’t yet shared the fun.

There’s a handsome book based on the exhibit–Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize,
Ulf Larsson (Editor), ISBN: 0881352888, $29.95 at Amazon.

Here’s an excerpt reprinted in American Scientist:

What allowed Barbara McClintock to see farther and deeper than her colleagues? Again and again, she stated that a researcher must take the time to look, have the patience to “hear what the material has to say to you,” and be open to what is in front of you….Some of McClintock’s fellow researchers felt that research on corn was far too slow. At best, corn can be harvested twice a year, while microorganisms reproduce in just a few minutes. For Barbara McClintock this was an advantage, since it gave her time for the analyses and insights necessary for a deeper understanding of her work.

Hello, have we met? I’m Betsy Devine. I grew up in NH, but now I live in Cambridge. Some people think my new neighborhood is noisy. Maybe so–but when I hear the trolley go rattling by, I think, “Woo hoo! I am living in a city!”

If you’re coming to BloggerCon— I hope you are–here are some non-blog things I recommend.

• At Au Bon Pain (1360 Mass Ave), you can play chess with a master. Better yet, sit on the terrace with your latte and let someone else play chess–while you watch the world’s diversity walking by.
• Hop on the Red Line subway–get off anywhere. If you head “Inbound” from Harvard, enjoy a surprise vista out over the Charles River. If you head “Outbound”, go all the way out to Alewife and have a meal at Jasper’s Summer Shack. (Bring plenty of money or plenty of self-restraint.)
• Before there were blogs, there were books and libraries–if you are like me, and revel in such delights, buy Library: An Unquiet History. I just went to a book signing, the author is awesome.
• Visit the Harvard Bookstore, 1256 Mass. Ave–it’s a real bookstore. No, not the Coop (pronounced in Cambridge as if it were housing for chickens.)
• Public toilets in Harvard Square? The Coop, but only if you’re desperate–gross. Look for “The Garage,” which has decent, cheap food, not to mention Newbury Comics. Clean toilets are in the basement.
• Just walk on by the well-fed panhandlers who make a good living by embarassing tourists. (If you see someone in actual need of your help, that’s totally different.)

If you see two blonde crones on Day #2, say hi! That will be Kalilily (in tight jeans or pirate garb) and me (expect to see me, like Stendhal, in red and black.)

I hope you’ll love it here as much as I do.

A little brown frog with shimmery bright green lipstick now lives at the edge of a pond in my yard.

Such are the riches of the internet that one minute you can be googling “frog + Massachusetts” and the next minute you’ve hopped into a world full of pre-blogs* full of frogs.

For example, when Otto and Friedo Berninghausen created their tadpole-identification website, they were talking about frogs, not introducing themselves. But consider their wiggly tadpole graphic (above). Consider their instructions for ordering water-resistant tadpole books from the Nabu Natur Shop:

Include 14.90 EURO cash and add about 2.00 or 3.00 EURO for postage.

Another pre-blogger I just got to know is talented nature photographer Mike Redmer. Like any blogger, he’s eager to share stuff he just learned and thinks you’ll appreciate–for example, he’s written articles about the diet of female bird-voiced treefrogs and how to take a portrait of your snake. I also learned that he’s an expert in “skeletochronology.” Talk about sharing personal information….

I feel I’ve also “met” Wellesley instructor Marcy Thomas. She has piled up some wonderful web links on her course pages. I love her photo-permission statement on her page about vernal pools, which seems to come straight from an older, friendlier internet:

Photos were taken by Marcy Thomas and VPOP students and will be updated as better ones become available. You are welcome to use them.

If you have some time to waste on the internet–hey, if you don’t, why the heck are you reading my blog? I urge you to read the “pre-bloggers” in your field.

* I made up the word “pre-blog” to describe the kind of personal, amateur web pages you can find all over the web. Reading “around the edges” of their pages, you feel you get to know the authors–the kind of generous, enthusiastic people who’d spend hours to share what they know about little brown frogs.