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Saturday, October 04, 2003
BloggerCon 2003 VII Weblogs in Presidential Politics: Cameron Barrett, Eric Folley, Matt Gross, Joe Jones, and Dave Winer. Cameron Barrett works on the Wesley Clark campaign. Eric Folley is a representative of the Democratic National Committee. Mathew Gross is chief blogger for the Howard Dean campaign. Joe Jones volunteers for the Bob Graham campaign. And Dave Winer is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. Dave Winer: Here are some ideas to start with: Link to everything. Don't just write about your guy or link to positive press. Bring on pied pipers. Bring in people from the outside who have experience with Weblogs. Independent bloggers on the press bus happened in the Dean campaign. It's OK to have PR people on your press bus, but it's not OK to only have PR people on your press bus. Suggest advocacy guidelines before some of your supporters begin flaming your opponents. It hasn't happened yet, but it's inevitable. A very pragmatic thing, publish your schedule on your Weblog. Something that turned out to be very controversial is that people should stay out of software. Let the software developers make the software. Software should be agnostic. Finally, speak about democracy. Talk about how wonderful Weblogs are for talking about democracy. Talk about Jefferson. Let a tear fall. And offer hosting for people. Those are just some ideas from someone who doesn't support any candidate, doesn't support a party, but does support the use of Weblogs for political campaigns. Matt Gross: It's absolutely exhausting being the chief blogger for the Dean campaign. I can't emphasize enough how incredible it's been. March 15 we launched the first Dean blog. In June we moved to Moveable Type, and that's when the blog really started to take off. Since June 10, we've had 100,000 comments. Yesterday, we had 2,200 comments. It's really pushed the technology. There's a huge mania that's been built up. I'd always thought of a blogger as someone who had a site and posted entries. When we launched the comments, people who posted comments were calling themselves bloggers and saying, "I'm a blogger for Dean." At first I thought they got the definition wrong, but it's the users, and it is the grassroots. Winer: Maybe it's not the form. Maybe it's an attitude. Joe Jones: I'm 19 first of all. I go to the University of Florida. I was about to come home for the summer, and I learned that Bob Graham was looking for interns. I wrote him and said I could do this and this and this. Then he wrote me back about a month later just before I had to go into for some surgery. When I wrote back, they said they didn't have any more internships, so I went in and asked what I could do. They said I could answer emails. They learned I knew some HTML and asked if I wanted to take over the blog. I used to keep a journal on Blogger but didn't really know much about it. I taught myself CSS over night and started to fake it. I started to recruit amateurs who were blogging about Graham. It turned into a groupblog. It's all run by volunteers. I'm a volunteer. They wanted to put me on payroll, but I wanted to go back to school. I didn't want to be a dropout for Graham. But I hope it goes well and goes well into the general election. Winer: How did you start your blogs? Eric Folley: I've had a blog for a couple of years. Maybe it was something we could put up to get more content out there. The old Web site, as I call it, is mostly news releases, some longer feature pieces. There's a lot of stuff that our people see every day that can't be put out before the public. We were talking about this. After a week of writing HTML and the Perl code for the back end -- we didn't use off-the-shelf software -- we had the initial design and went back to the group. I was expecting us to get the name passed. Winer: What is the name? Folley: Kicking Ass. We launched it two days later. Our research department has gotten involved. We got the head of our delegate selection process involved. We got more and more people involved. Ironically, our communications team hasn't posted yet. They like it, but it's taken them a little longer to figure out what to do with it. We wanted to make it as painless as possible. 18 people have permission to post to the blog. You put something up on a staff blog and people have an hour to get back to you. An hour is a pretty quick turnaround time. One little piece of news that we did break was a story about a group that released a new study about Bush tax cuts and their impact on spending deficits. That's not something we would've done before we got the blog. Winer: Cameron, did you go after them, or did they come after you? Cameron Barrett: Until too long ago, I was going to Dean Meetups. I wasn't sold on Dean and started looking around. A former boss of mine whose now the director of technology at the Clark campaign asked me if I wanted to go down to Little Rock. I quit my contract job, and two days later, there I was. I've been involved in Weblogs for a long time. Like Matt, I find working on a political campaign extremely tiring but also exhilarating. And I plan to keep on doing it. Winer: You guys are recreating our political system. Let's try that out. How many comments did you say? Gross: We got 2,200. That doesn't physically bog down, but it's hard to read, so you keep it moving. A month from now, it's going to be even bigger. I've hired two assistants. Winer: No human being can read 1,000 responses. How do you spread this thing out? Gross: I don't know of any blog that's reaching this level of saturation. I'm a writer. What are some of the tools? When we win the nomination, how does one deal with the fact that you're going to become one of the largest sites in the United States? Winer: Let's assume you do become the nominee, what are you trying to accomplish with your blog? Gross: It's the same message of the candidate. The only way to defeat George Bush is for everyone to become involved and join the dialogue. It really is a two-way street. Winer: Does it pay for itself? How much has the Dean campaign raised online? Gross: I don't know the final numbers, but maybe $12 million this year. Barrett: The Clark finance numbers aren't public yet, but I can say that two thirds of the money was raised on the Internet. Winer: Cam, do you have any advice for your competitors? Barrett: We're going to run into the same problem Matt mentioned: Too many comments on a single post. Use the comments to your advantage and get those people to start their own Weblogs. Christopher Lydon: Is any candidate bloggable? Barrett: They need to have a personality, be able to write well, and have something to say. Question: What happens in the back room? Barrett: It has to be personal. Gross: I'd agree. On the Dean campaign, there is no committee discussing what goes on the Weblog. What attracts me as a writer to the blogosphere was that as an op-ed writer, the blogosphere has a 15-minute news cycle. That's what's exciting. It's constantly moving. When you slow that down, you reduce the other attraction of the blogosphere, which is the uniqueness of the voices that are out there. There may be multiple voices on a team blog? Winer: Do you think the DNC blog is a blog? Barrett: Yeah. It's a good blog. But when the DNC Research Team posts, I'm not interested because I don't know who they are. Folley: We want people to use their names, but Research fought that and wanted to post as a division. Gross: The chief blogger is the chief communicator between people who leave comments and the people running the campaign. Jones: People don't care about policy. People don't have time to know about policy. This is a way to build community and buzz. Gross: If you're a hierarchical campaign with the command at the top, the captains and the lieutenants, and it just goes down, the blog is nothing but window dressing. Blogging is revolutionizing presidential politics, depending on the internal politics, is the commenting. You get real-time feedback, and you know you're talking as though you're in the room in Burlington HQ. And you are. It used to be that maybe you'd send an email. May make a phone call. Now what you have is lateral communication at the national political level. Certain phrases, things, and ideas come up to us. Question: I see blogs right now just as buzz. This is the first election in which they're being used, and we haven't seen any results. To be honest, I'm affiliated with another campaign. Winer: Which campaign? Gross: Be honest. Question: Edwards. And if we're only reaching 2% of the population, that's not going to win us a campaign. Gross: One of the things that's been interesting about the Dean blog is that 70-80% of the people who have come to our site didn't know what a blog was. At the same time, you need to treat bloggers as opinion makers. They have influence. Dan Gillmor: Expand on that a little bit. The Dean campaign has embraced a lot of stuff they're not responsible for. You've been thrilled with the other people out there. The Clark campaign has not, at least reportedly, treated independent bloggers as well as they would have liked. Barrett: I wasn't involved in the rift between the Draft Clark campaigns. But I do know that there was a problem legally between one of the Draft Clark campaigns and the main campaign -- and one journalist decided to make a story out of it. Question: When your candidate wins, what happens to the blog? Gross: It becomes the White House blog. BloggerCon 2003: Interlude II Feedster's BloggerCon Buzz might be the best one-stop shop for BloggerCon confblogs. Mapping Media Ethan Zuckerman, whom I haven't had a chance to say hello to yet today, is working on a project that tracks global media attention. He maps what countries newspapers and media outlets such as the Washington Post are paying attention to, color coding them to indicate how "hot" they are. He's been tracking global media attention since late June. Fascinating! Update: Just said hi to Ethan, who's heading to Hungary soon. BloggerCon 2003 VI Cluetrain 2003, the Second Superpower: Adam Curry, Christopher Lydon, Jim Moore, Doc Searls, and Elizabeth Spiers. Adam Curry once hosted MTV's highest-rated program, the Top 20 Countdown. Christopher Lydon founded the Connection show on National Public Radio. Jim Moore is a business and technology strategist who wrote The Death of Competition. Doc Searls is a senior editor for Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Elizabeth Spiers is the editor of Gawker, a Manhattan Weblog. Christopher Lydon: This session is kind of theory and practice, only there's no practice, just theory. The question is essentially the word "transformation." On a scale of 1-10, how big a transformation are we talking about? Doc, you're Mr. Cluetrain. You're in the locomotive. Where is the Cluetrain? Where are we going? Give us a number first. Doc Searls: Transforming what, exactly? Lydon: Reality. Searls: Before Cluetrain, I went through my archives and came across something called Reality 2.0. PCs and the Net have the capacity to vastly transform the ways we do things. Radio and television are going to be vastly changed by syndication, which is an old newspaper thing. I say 100%. Adam Curry: I view Weblogs a little bit differently. To me, it's just a tool. I see them just as revolutionary as the telephone. How are we going to use this tool? For radio and television, the transformation will be 100% The way your interviews are now distributed, I pick up my iPod, and it has the new Christopher Lydon interview on it. It's reverse Tivo. Lydon: Is it bigger than the fax machine? Is it as big as the railroad? Curry: Perhaps this is a start of connecting people's brainwaves? We're acting as human routers. Elizabeth Spiers: For me, it's kind of hard to say. I have such a granular perspective. I'm a media commentator on my blog. I get paid to navel gaze. The Weblog phenomenon has been unique for me because I'm generally a pessimist. People in the media are thinking about how to take advantage of the medium. To me, it's just a sophisticated extension of the Web. Lydon: You've even said that in a few years, having a blog will be just like having email. Jim Moore: This transformation is huge. Hotmail and Yahoo, most of their traffic comes from the third world. Go to Ghana, and you'll see 100-200 Internet cafes. Imagine those people blogging. That's a big deal. In Africa, there's a real interest in not letting the digital divide be bridged. Lydon: So you're a 10. Moore: I'm whatever number you want. Lydon: I want to take it beyond 10. Blogging is a fulfillment of the most classic American writer, Emerson, and his world of expressive individualism. Searls: I think the first blogs came from Benjamin Franklin. Lydon: Thomas Paine. I.F. Stone. Searls: Blogs are a form of collective journalism. What we're doing is deconstructing the Matrix. The Matrix is a metaphor for the media. We have received experience. There's a lot more in the blogs. People are bringing up stuff that no one else is talking about. Lydon: We're much too modest about what we've discovered in blogworld. Going to public radio or the New York Times is a step down. We've found a shit detector and relevance detector that will change the world. Jim, where's the power of the Second Superpower? They certainly lost the Iraq war. Moore: This isn't just an individual phenomenon. It's really a collective phenomenon. Howard Rheingold talks about smart mobs. What we need are wise mobs. You can't really blow up a society and then have a democracy spring up. We've made it worse for Jordan in terms of democracy by tearing things up. We need to understand our wisdom, accept our role, think of things like Joi Ito's emergent democracy. Searls: In 1974, the only outlet people had was to run to the window and yell. I want to see more bloggers in Baghdad. More Chief Wiggles. Lydon: What about mobloggers among the troops? Searls: Chief Wiggles is one. What we have is Yell TV and Yell Radio. I heard your interview with Paul Krugman. Then I saw him on TV, and he wasn't really allowed to say anything. He was the guy on the left fighting with the guy on the right. It's not that cut and dried. Moore: We need a system that allows for deeper and deeper truth finding. I respect diversity in the collective, but at any given moment, you need to assess the wisdom of that collectivity. Lydon: Do we want to talk about human nature? Question: Human nature argues against the utopian views expressed here. Networked communications has the power to find like-minded people. It's human nature to seek facts that agree with you. I'm optimistic, but I'm not that optimistic. BloggerCon 2003: Interlude So, I'm conflbogging BloggerCon 2003 today. There are so many people here tippy-tapping during the sessions, that I almost decided not to confblog at all. In the end, I am posting partial real-time transcripts of the talks as they progress. It took awhile for me to get online, but all seems set now. My reports are nowhere near as complete as they've been in the past, but you're welcome to check out the blogroll of participants. Or go to Dan Bricklin's photos and Kevin Mark's bootleg video feed from the front row. Plenty of documentation going on as we speak, so to speak. BloggerCon 2003 V Interview with a Blogger: Len Apcar, Scott Rosenberg, and James Taranto Len Apcar is editor in chief of the New York Times's Web site. Scott Rosenberg works for Salon. James Taranto writes the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web column. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion: Rosenberg: James, do you consider Best of the Web a blog? Taranto: I describe it as a column in blog form. Rather than publish it at will as Glenn Reynolds does, I publish it once a day whenever I'm done. It's edgier than the typical newspaper piece, and in many ways, it's very much like a log. Rosenberg: It sounds like it's close enough to a blog. Is it edited by anyone? Taranto: I write the thing. I have an editorial assistant who helps me out. I post it to the site so it's not visible yet. I call an editor. If there's any institutional sensitivity, my superiors will ask to see a specific item, but in most cases, I make the final call. Rosenberg: How do the people you report to feel about the whole thing? Taranto: They seem to like it. I know my boss reads it every day. Rosenberg: Len, New York Times Weblogs. Is there anything going on like that right now? Apcar: I came here to get a sense of how we might go about this, be true to what we do, and still be something different online. We haven't done anything like this, but there are a couple of things I'd like to try online during the campaign. There's this opinion that editors are thought police. That's not true in thoughtful journalism, and it's not true at the Times. Rosenberg: There's a feeling that Weblogs are fundamental different from traditional journalism and that it's changing that world. You told us there's already a blog at the New York Times. Nick Kristof is someone who's had a long and distinguished career at the Times. This is someone who clearly is going to be doing work that you don't have to worry about in the same way you might if you gave this tool to someone else. Apcar: That being said, people make mistakes. If you read Kristof's blog, Kristof Responds, he corrects things he gets wrong. We're comfortable with that. I'd rather he correct it than ignore it. Rosenberg: Is that reflected on the formal corrections page in the Times? Apcar: No. Usually, columnists will correct mistakes in their columns. The correction area is the newsroom's. Also, I don't think we're ready to give over a blog to proprietary information about our editorial process and how, say, a headline is written throughout the day. Do we share this with journalism schools and visitors? Sure. But there's not a whole lot of argument debate or quantitative debate going on while choosing five or six headlines for the front page. We're not comfortable discussing internal discussions. BloggerCon 2003 IV Weblogs in Education: AKM Adam, Patrick Delaney, Lance Knobel, Jenny Levine, Kaye Trammell, and Brian Weatherson AKM Adam is an associate professor of the New Testament at Seabury-Western. Pat Delaney is a librarian who works with the Bay Area Writing Project. Lance Knobel was responsible for the program of the Davos meeting in January 2000. Jenny Levine is an Internet development specialist for the suburban library System in Burr Ridge, Illinois. Kaye Trammell is a mass communication doctoral student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. Brian Weatherson works in the department of philosophy at Brown University. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion: Lance Knobel: What interests me about the Weblog world is that it's a number of largely disconnected spheres. There's very little connection between the worlds of people reading about journalism, people reading about economics, and people reading about political philosophy. We're going to discuss a variety of aspects of Weblogs in education, from K-12 education to serious scholarship. That's a tall order, but we have an interesting group. Delaney: I'm a high-school librarian and a staff developer for the Bay Area Writing Project. I use Weblogs in about six ways. Knobel: Are you doing things and people need to read you or are you encouraging people to use them themselves? Delaney: I'm a domain manager for a domain of people who use Weblogs. AKM Adam: I'm AKM Adam. I teach, I'm a homeschooling parent, and I'm a manager of an online site for theological researchers. I'm a personal blogger, as well. Brian Weatherson: I'm Brian Weatherson. I'm a professor at Brown University. I use blogs for two things. I have an old-fashioned writing notebook. And I have a blog of new philosophy that's been published on the Web in the last 24 hours. Kaye Trammell: I'm Kaye Trammell. I teach in the online journalism track at the University of Florida. Go Gators. I'm a doctoral student researching a certain kind of blog. I'm also incorporating blogs into our curriculum so students use blogs. I've also been instrumental in bringing blogs into a variety of curricula at the university for designers and students taking a technology and culture class. Jenny Levine: I'm Jenny Levine. And I'm a librarian. I work in the suburban library system in Illinois. I'm trying to get librarians to use blogging. I also do my blog, the Shifted Librarian. Knobel: Pat, you're using Weblogs for writing. What do Weblogs offer that other means don't? What's new? Delaney: K-12 teachers have very full plates. I call it digital paper. I don't call it Weblogs. What you can do with Weblogs is read, write, and research. As a representative of the Bay Area Writing Project, I don't care what people teach. They should be writing. We're moving from a paper classroom environment to a digital classroom environment. Knobel: The Web is a writer's medium. Delaney: And a reader's medium. And a researcher's medium. Knobel: Is it the ease of use that matters? Does the openness of it matter? Delaney: The bigger notion to that is the notion of audience. One of the fundamental problems of a teacher giving an assignment is that if the teacher is the only audience for a project, who gives a crap? With blogs, other people outside of the classroom walls have the potential of paying attention to them. The publishing aspect of traditional writing is embedded in blogging. 13-16 year olds love making their Weblogs look good. In the writing process, you get an idea, you brainstorm, you draft it, you get some feedback, you revise it, and you publish it. Bryan Bell does the same thing with themes. It was an amazing moment to watch seven blograts listen to Bryan talk about the way he does his work. That's how writers do their work. Adam: One of the peculiarities of my working environment in a seminary is that almost of my student expect to become clergy. The openness Pat mentions is something my students dread. What if they say something their bishop doesn't like? We need to compel students to express themselves in public. The leverage we've got is that they're all preparing to become public communicators. Knobel: This thing about getting caught… When I suggested Brian as one of the panelists, someone asked if he was tenured. If you're not tenured and you're blogging, is that a problem? Weatherson: Probably not in the way that you think. A lot of what I've written is faulty. That's OK. When I started, it was for a real micro-audience. But with Google and archiving and so forth, some of it can get back to whom you're writing about. Knobel: Kaye, with your students, is the openness of the Web an advantage? Trammell: Their perception is very different than mine. Students have always had very clear expectations about what they should write when they turn in a paper. When you're blogging, you're on their turf. Students know how to use the Internet. They're free to say anything they want, but then you put the constraints of the classroom over them. Students have to contribute to a personal or professional blog, and then they have to contribute to a class blog. In their professional blog, they'll say things they never would have said in their reporting classes. How can we transcend that? Knobel: There's an issue of decorum. Are you imposing that, or are they finding a different voice by the medium? I'm not sure what the problem is. Trammell: I'm opposing it. I'm the online editor, and I tell students the rules about the content I expect from them. They find a different voice. I encourage them to use that as their own personal commentary column. It's a fine line between what I expect and what they're giving. Levine: The public library has a blog on Blogspot for 4-6 graders about book reports. Kaye: It's definitely an evolutionary process. Do we give them lots of rules? It depends on what the role of the teacher is. Delaney: There are a couple of issues we're dealing with. One is legal. You have to be careful about ID'ing students. In my district, this is all so new that no one's blown the whistle on any major gaffs that have happened. It'd be good for the education to learn about what SIPA and COPA mean for grade schools. School admins are overworked. If something bad happens it's very easy for the admin or a parent to go to a superintendent and shut that blog server down. Knobel: Does it diminish the value to put it behind a wall? Delaney: We used blogs in a summer writing camp. The first year, we assigned teachers to the Weblogs. They went into the Weblogs and responded to the kids. The next summer, we didn't have as much money and not as many teachers responded. We asked students to comment on each other. People were upset that people in North Dakota weren't reading their poetry or that people in California weren't telling them how cool they were. You have to earn your audience. Trammell: That publicness is one of the most important things we have going for us. There's a two-person relationship between a student and a professor when you're writing your paper. The student can allow quality to drop. If it's on a Weblog, it's public. Anyone can read it. I pitch it that everyone is reading it. Potential employers. Your mother. The chair of the department. It makes them think more about the work that they're producing. Delaney: Someone on the journalism panel talked about localization. In school, you might not get someone in North Dakota. Levine: Then there's what people were saying about critical evaluation of the people that you're reading. Question: If students are writing for the public and we scale this up, students around the world are producing a large part of the content for the world. That's extraordinary. Students become authors. David Weinberger: Should everyone learn how to blog as a life skill? Or is it like singing, and not everyone should do it public? Delaney: I don't call them Weblogs. It's digital paper. I want people to learn how to use digital paper as a writer, a reader, and a researcher. Trammell: Should it be a lifestyle? What blogs offer is a voice to every person who wants to have it heard. Little Kaye Trammel from Kansas can have a voice and have her voice heard. How you critically think about what happens in your world make everyone better. I want students to learn how to use the medium in a way that won't get them fired. Levine: You're not going to get this without information literacy. When you talk about kids doing research, going out, and finding links, they shouldn't just use Google. There are databases that libraries license. Delaney: It's not quite there yet. Yeah, everybody who has a certain amount of money and school districts that have a reliable server admin have access. Ethan Zuckerman: One of the major obstacles at Harvard is a pretty aggressive privacy policy. For technical reasons, we've decided to make student blogs only accessible within Harvard. Is this something we need to be aggressive about to make sure these are blogs and not just class reports? Weatherson: If you give students the right to use pseudonyms, it gives students the option. People might say it goes against the public nature, but very few students do it. At this point, my attention wandered, and I turned to continuing to try to get online. Knobel: I don't know if we can make any real conclusions. But there seems to be tremendous belief and pent-up energy about the potential of Weblogs in education. You're going to have a radical shift of expectations from students, from parents, and from teachers. BloggerCon 2003 III Interview with a Blogger: Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, and Dave Winer Dan Gillmor works as a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Doc Searls is a senior editor for Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. And Dave Winer is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion: Dave Winer: The media industry is extremely important and we need to get more media people blogging. Candidates raise money so they can place ads in the media. Is there any conflict of interest with media covering political campaigns? Yes. Is there any transparency looking into that process? No. Dan, what is your policy about this? Dan Gillmor: It's not a single line. It's like any institution. I work for them. I do not think it is my role to expose to the world the workings of the organizations I work for. The blogging part, the exposing to the world, is more about making the world transparent as a journalist, not making my organization transparent. You want me to tell all. Winer: I don't want you to tell all. I want to understand what I'm reading. The Mercury News deleted all of Dan's archived. I'd been linking to his archives. Links break because they break, but removing archives is an editorial decision. In the matter of a John Robb, it's a very delicate issue. I have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of the company. I also need to follow the laws of California. Employment agreements are very clear. There's an industry out there that we have no visibility into because they control the news. Doc Searls: There's more transparency in the media industry than there've ever been before. I have the sense that the Greensboro paper is more transparent because Ed's out there talking about it. It may not be that the boiler rooms of decision making are fully exposed all the time, but there are people blogging and participating on the outside. Winer: Are there any scandals about campaigns and the media that we're not aware of? Searls: I'm sure there is. Dan Bricklin: If you're an insider, what's your responsibility as an insider? Winer: The Cluetrain Manifesto gives a clue to that: You're supposed to tell the truth. Searls: You're supposed to talk. Winer: People have to expect to be told what's going on. Gillmor: You have the view that the media has a responsibility to be more transparent than other industries. Winer: No. I don't think the media is as transparent as other industries. Gillmor: The media needs to be more relentless about covering other media. Winer: Bloggers need to be more relentless. Would you take on the New York Times? Gillmor: If I had something particularly juicy, I like to think that I'd be able to. BloggerCon 2003 II Weblogs and Journalism: Ed Cone, Joshua Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, and Scott Rosenberg Ed Cone is a senior writer for Baseline, a business and technology magazine published by Ziff Davis Media, and an opinion columnist for the News & Record, the monopoly daily newspaper in Greensboro, North Carolina. Joshua Marshall is a columnist for The Hill and contributing writer for Washington Monthly. Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. Scott Rosenberg works for Salon. Here is a rough transcript of their panel discussion: Ed Cone: Josh, you got an interview with Wesley Clark. Why did you put it on your Weblog? Why was he willing to let you put it on your Weblog rather than in a more traditional venue? Joshua Marshall: The whole point was for it to be on the Weblog. It seemed obvious to me that they're just getting into the campaign. The Dean campaign is one of their things. This was their attempt to leapfrog and get into the game. They're Internet savvy. For my part, I'm much more invested in my Web site than any of the places that pay me money to write for them. That's my thing. That's what I'm associated with. I've been doing the site for three years now. When I first started it and the hit count was so low, there was the question that if I got a big interview, would I use it on the site or take it somewhere else? There's the professional question and the money question. Over time, I had the money question less and less. I do things on the site because I can control how it comes out. As the site got more hits, there was no question for me. It benefits me personally. Cone: Glenn, how do you build the biggest media brand in independent media, how do you build hit count? Was it 911? Glenn Reynolds: That was part of it. I teach Internet law. I thought having a blog would be kind of cool. Traffic took off pretty fast. The only thing I did that you could call marketing is that when I wrote a story, I would email it to a reporter or a pundit. It grew faster, even before 911, than I expected. Other sites link to me more. It's a viral thing. Every time someone links to you, your hits go up. The only thing I've done is that I link to a lot of people. There is a school of thought that if you link to people, people might like them better. This whole "Keep people on your site" theory reminds me of Glen Baxter-style journalism. People come to me because I'm not really that interesting a guy, but I seem to find the interesting people. Cone: You can get 100,000 page views a day just by writing the word "Indeed," after something someone else said. Scott, you work for an organization. How is that different than what these people are doing? Rosenberg: The question on people's minds is that we have this thing called blogging, which is very individualistic. Then we have these large, hierarchical media organizations looking at blogging. People are very afraid. At Salon, I'm lucky. I wear several hats. I'm an editor. I'm a writer. As managing editor, I'm able to do a blog. And the organization is concerned with me saying something that will disrupt the organization because I'm a key part of it. We don't have a concern with writers holding the mic. A lot of writers, particularly people who are used to doing professional journalism, actually want to be edited. Some writers prefer to work that way. The editing question isn't black and white: Let the individual voice free. Don't edit me. Cone: That sort of new frontier is interesting. One of the most tired questions is positing that blogging is either/or -- that it's either a blog or journalism. What are some of the places that blogs are going to take journalism that are currently closed to journalism? Marshall: It will allow journalists to do a little more Hunter S. Thompson tagging along with campaigns. There's the issue of what's on the record and what's not. There are contexts in which you can repeat what people say. And there are contexts in which you can't. Reynolds: I remember Irving Goffman writing about the importance of the back stage. That's not just psychologically important, because a lot of things need to be said not in public. But the backstage is disappearing. The whole idea of closing things to the press is meaningless. This guy who does NineDwarfs.com was trying to get his picture taken with every candidate. And the Kerry campaign was trying to keep him away. Kerry's campaign got blogging more than they've gotten anything else. You used to worry about Hunter S. Thompson catching you, or some famous journalist. Now you're worried about some guy who's name I don't even remember whose had a blog for three weeks. Rosenberg: Then there's the backstage of journalism itself. Look at Jim Romenesko's site. Just by having one place where the entire spectrum of the coverage of media and adding a letters page, that simple little opening of a window an inch has had made a huge difference. Now we have an entire blogosphere of people writing about what's happening inside their newspapers and magazines. I agree a little more with Doc. I'm dedicated to reading my New York Times as it is. I want it to be what it is. I don't want it to become a blog. But the impact of blogs is that an institution like the New York Times needs to open itself up a little more. It already has. Just recently, there was an item about how they select letters. They never would have done that before. At this point, the conversation largely devolved, fracturing into Q&A and unproductive targeting of Reynolds. Some people did comment on several interesting concepts: your personal reputation as the institution you represent, the challenge of not short-changing other media outlets by blogging stories first, how people decide what stories go where, and the ethics of amateur journalism. Marshall: If I worked for a large institution, there'd be pressure for me to ask more and different questions. My interest is much more, can they talk at length. You can't stay on message if you're talking at length. Here it is. If you think it's too long, don't read it. It's not a take it or leave it, but I think that people who read the site are willing to read longer stuff. Question: We're getting to the Fox News-ification of blogs. Be up front with your bias. Say where you stand. Blogs are basically doing what's the worst of traditional journalism does. Question: That's a particularly American view. The thinking that people should declare their biases is talking down. Cone: What I think he's saying is that people need to stop smoke-screening their biases. Dave Winer: Let's talk about the future. What's the vision for what you want to do? Reynolds: The writing is easy. The hard part is that you have to pay attention to the news. There are all sorts of studies that prove the more you pay attention to the news, the more depressed you're going to be. Question: We all tend to edit our opinions about each other. If I read in 15 places that I consider reputable that Glenn's statements are facts, I will tend to believe what he says. Whatever's written is something that I should evaluate. Weblogs have allowed you to do your own fact checking. Cone: We'd all like to get paid to do our dream jobs. I would love to do nothing but blog all day. Where are you guys going to be? Josh, you're cited by Paul Krugman as the guy he reads. What happens when the New York Times comes to you? Reynolds: They ought to give him a blog. Marshall: I haven't considered that for a lot of reasons. It's difficult to consider any job opportunity that would make me give up the blog. Cone: Would you consider putting your blog under a logo? Marshall: No. Winer: Why not? You're sitting next to a guy who puts a logo on his blog. Rosenberg: Salon is an exception. It was started by a bunch of people from the San Francisco Examiner who were upset by how a strike had turned out. My hope for the future is that in a year or two years, we're no longer asking this question. I've spent the last eight years to turn a Web magazine into a successful business. We're not even close to making money. My advice in terms of blogging to make money is: Don't even try. Cone: Then there's the idea of the local Weblog. When I think of my audience, a lot of times, with something like Rush Limbaugh, I don't even care what I think about Rush Limbaugh. In North Carolina, there were all sorts of local issues that weren't being covered, so I started writing for a local audience. I target my stuff to journalists, political readers, and a local audience. Reynolds: SK Bubba has become a factor in local politics. A lot of stuff doesn't get covered. He's made a difference. That's a huge marketing opportunity. Question: Journalists cannot afford to cover every issue or every meeting. Bloggers bring out more information. Cone: Weblogs and links create more Weblogs and links. The discussion devolved again, but Jay Rosen, chair of the journalism program at New York University brought up an interesting point about every reader being a writer. Doc Searls then said that it was moot to even think about audience or readers when blogging. That dovetailed interestingly with the fact that Reynolds, Winer, and others don't allow comments on their posts because they're afraid of the troll factor or comment spam. If you don't allow comments, you're missing part of the point of blogging. If you're not open to feedback -- and replying to that feedback publicly -- you're not participating in a conversation. One audience member suggested that blogging facilitates parallel conversations. Another said, "People who are used to writing monologues need to be open to a dialogue." I'm with her. BloggerCon 2003 Morning Coffee Notes: Dave Winer Dave Winer is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. He is host of BloggerCon 2003. Here is a rough transcript of his talk: I have some ground rules. Everything said here is on the record, for attribution. This is also a user's conference. We do have vendors present, and we're here to talk about how this technology is used. We're looking at uses. Another ground rule: Let's not debate whether blogs are journalism. Blogs are journalism. And blogs aren't journalism. Think of it as an instrument. I don't think those debates go anywhere. That said, the question, "What is a Weblog?" is a very good question. Because we're in an academic setting, we do care about that. These are some ideas that I jotted down, things that I think are hot topics. How much editing can you do on a Weblog? How many people? I've tried to write my own definition of a Weblog: The unedited voice of a person. Somehow in there, there's a concept: The editorial product of a professional news organization and the editorial product of a blog. Does it make sense for the New York Times to have a blog? New York magazine now has a Weblog. We're one word away from the New York Times Another thing, think of this as a Weblog. We have a bunch of bloggers in the room. Think of the microphone as a pointer. Conferences and blogs share a lot in common. We're going to talk about the Second Superpower, which resonated hugely with people. We're going to look at the Cluetrain 2003. How do you join the conversation? I've had my cynical years. I've had my great years. Now I'm cynical again. But there's this streak of idealism running through the whole thing. I don't think we're going to talk about money. Maybe at some point, BloggerCon 2030, money will be on the table. One thing for sure, presidential politics are on the table. What is the Dean phenomenon about? Was it the blogging world finding a candidate? Or was it a candidate using the Internet? What comes next? Wednesday, October 01, 2003
Virtual Book Tour 2 Media Diet will be the first stop on the forthcoming Virtual Book Tour featuring Dennis Hensley's new book Screening Party. Dennis will join me Monday, Oct. 6, as a contributor to Media Diet, offering pointers to and commentary on magazines, books, movies, music, and other media items and artifacts related to the subject of his book. The Restaurant I Ate at Last Night XXII After surveying the state of my apartment and deciding I needed to let the dust settle more before reorganizing my belongings, I grabbed a book and fled to Rangzen, a cozy Tibetan restaurant just blocks away from Church Corner. Having lived in the neighborhood for three years, I've never eaten there. And while I don't think it's as good as the House of Tibet on Teele Square in Somerville, it is still an excellent eatery. About $20 got me an appetizer of mashed potato balls with chives, an entree of strips of beef sauteed with spinach on basmati rice, and a mug of butter and salt tea. The appetizer was amazing and would make a nice snack. I thought the entree was a little underspiced, particularly given the blandness of the rice, but I'm still bummed I left the leftovers in the fridge at home. And the butter and salt tea wasn't as strong as I remember the tea being at House of Tibet. The restaurant wasn't crowded, the staff was friendly if not overly attentive, and the music was peaceful and soothing -- just what I needed given the damage done to my living space. Workaday World XXXVIII I got home last night to find that they hadn't finished work on my apartment. Most of the work was done, but the workers still needed to come back today to touch up some paint, patch a couple of walls, and patch the floor in the kitchen. There were two asphyxiating patches of freshly varnished floor, I found a note indicating that everything had to be a full foot away from the new vents -- my foot! -- and I decided not to begin rearranging until they were totally finished. I went out for a quick bite, cleared off the bed, and read until I couldn't remain awake. This morning, I got up at 6 a.m. and left as quickly as I could, piling stuff back onto the bed. I've been at work since 7, and luckily, I haven't been hit by a wave of sleepiness like yesterday. I sure hope they finish everything today. I've never experienced something so inconvenient, intrusive, and invasive. Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Workaday World XXXVII I got home last night to find that they hadn't finished work on my apartment. My landlord didn't mess things up too much moving stuff around, but he'd neglected to mention that they'd be putting vents in the bathroom and kitchen, as well. The place was basically unlivable, so I went out to eat at Charlie's, caught a show at the Middle East, had an end-of-night drink (anything to avoid being home!), and slept on the floor next to my bed, which was piled high with stuff. Got up and out this morning before the workers were scheduled to return and worked for several hours before extreme sleepiness crashed into me like a wave. I just got up from a two-hour nap on the couch in the founding editor's old office. First time I've slept at work in six years. Monday, September 29, 2003
Corollary: Anchormen, Aweigh! XXVIII The Anchormen's newest CD was reviewed in the September issue of the Noise. Anchormen, Aweigh! XXVIII Members of the Handstand Command music collective are hosting a two-venue, seven-band independent music festival Saturday, Nov. 1. With performances at the Choppin' Block in Boston and P.A.'s Lounge in Somerville, the Operators and the Anchormen have organized a two-bill rockathon featuring Sophie Drinker, Dear Nora, Bread and Roses, the Young Sexy Assassins, and the Beatitudes from Denmark. We realize it's not overly convenient, given the distance between the two clubs, but we will be staggering set times to encourage back and forth travel, there will be a two-for-one admission special, and if everything works out, we'll have a shuttle bus running between the two locations. Should be cool! Workaday World XXXVI I just got a frantic phone call at work from my landlord. They're removing the radiators from all of the apartments in my building and installing new baseboard heating vents. Last week Wednesday, I got a voicemail that said they would do my apartment today, Monday. Perfect! I'd have the weekend to move all of the furniture away from the walls and get the place organized for the workers. Thursday morning, at about 8 a.m., one of my landlords knocks on my door and starts to key in. I had just gotten up and was getting ready for the day, so I answered the door groggily in my boxers and T-shirt. I said I thought they were going to come Monday. She said that they were hoping to remove the radiators that day. I said that I'd rather they wait until I was gone for the day -- or until Monday as they'd requested initially. I hadn't had a chance to get my apartment sorted. So yesterday, I rearranged my apartment, moving most everything away from the walls, piling stuff in the center of the apartment, and only having to leave one small corner cluttered because of my numerous books and records. I left a note this morning saying that if they couldn't do what they needed to do, they should do the bedroom first, as much as they could in the living room, and then tonight, I'd move stuff out of the living room to open more space. Anyway, back to that phone call. My landlord just called me at work saying that the workers needed everything moved away from the walls immediately. I said that I'd done as much as I could yesterday and left a note saying that if they needed me to move more stuff around, I'd do so tonight. I said that if they did the bedroom first, I could clear out the living room tonight. My landlord said that they'd already finished the bedroom -- it only takes 20 minutes to do what they need to do -- and they needed the other room cleaned up immediately. I asked him what he would suggest. Did he want me to come home from work? If it only takes them 20 minutes, couldn't they let me rearrange things tonight? Then he said that the first thing they said when they entered my apartment was that it was a fire hazard. And that when this was all over with, I'd have to do something about that. I said that I'd begun paring down on my books and records and that I'd keep clearing the place out. It's quite a hassle when your landlord doesn't provide any storage space in the building. So that's the end of my weekend -- and my Monday morning so far. It is such a hassle to have to move everything away from the walls for a new heating system when the old radiators worked just fine. It is also irritating that if it only takes 20 minutes, they couldn't have finished the work tomorrow. Did my landlord call me seeking assistance -- or just to yell at me? I shudder to think what my place will look like when I get home tonight. I feel bad about my landlord having to move stuff around. And I'm nervous about how they'll relate to me in the future if my place is, in fact, a "fire hazard." I do have a lot of books and records, but a fire hazard? In any event, I listed about 30 Mack Bolan, Destroyer, Deathlands, Stony Man, and other Gold Eagle men's adventure novels for sale in Amazon Marketplace this morning. Thus begins the Big Book Purge of 2003. Event-O-Dex LXXVI Monday, Sept. 29: Toshio Okada, co-founder of Gainax and screenwriter of Otaku no Video, speaks at MIT (8 p.m. in 4-370.) Addressing the topic "Fans Making Anime: The Early History of Gainax and Japanese Animation," Okada will explain how anime is made and how a small band of fans (otaku) managed to break into the industry and form the Gainax studio (Neon Genesis Evangelion). Comics and Community XVIII The Somerville Comics Collaborative has edited, scanned, and published this year's collectively created comic made at the Somerville Arts Council's annual ArtBeat festival. It's a wide-ranging tale involving cats and dogs, flying turtles, killer flowers, Buddha, and a whole bunch of banana pirates. In fact, it's called "Curse of the Banana Pirates." Check it out! Soundtrack: Colin Clary, "One Hundred Decembers" |
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