Month: February 2004

I should mention that this is my paraphrasing of Dave live. I can’t type verbatim that fast, and I’m posting real time rather than recording and returning later.

It doesn’t have to be president, in fact it was least likely that it would be a president. Because it mean confronting the power of television head on. And I think it’s pretty clear that the television channels decided that Dean wasn’t going to be president. But they don’t have that power at the state and local level. And someone is going to decide to do that. And that’s going to be my next quest, to go and find that person. And help them use weblogs, Meetup, and all that stuff. And I think we could do that in 2004.

I think that 2004 could be the most exciting campaign I’ve ever seen. Not in the horse race sense, but in the sense that we’re all involved in shaping the future of the nation.

And I think putting this all together, we’re getting to something that I call (all developers need terms) a “Voter Support System.” Because voters have no support, and they make lousy decisions.

I got in late. Dave is on stage now talking about evolution of RSS as a format:

…aggregators both on web in channels and reverse chronological order. We now have “thousands and thousands” of feeds, both big pubs and small publishers. And through this same interface you get both. And you can get triangulation.

Which leads into the next part of the story. It’s a short drive to New Hampshire; it’s retail politics. And we made a conscious decision to go. And the difference between us covering the story as amateurs and professionals is that professionals remove themselves from the story, and we don’t. And I think it’s more honest to tell about how you got there. And people joke about blogs about people’s cats, but I don’t mind that. Because it tells you where they’re coming from and you can figure out their point of view. And places like the New York Times claim they’re coming at it from objectivity, and from my experience that’s not necesarily true, they bring their viewpoint.

And a lot of us were Dean supporters. And though Jim Moore had a role as Director of Internet and something, and the campaign had bloggers and a campaign blog, I don’t think the Dean campaign ever accepted the Internet in that they didn’t bring what they saw (not the truth, because we know that’s complex, but just what they saw) to their coverage. And it came down to me being at campaign hq, the night of the scream, and Dean said, “We finished third.” And I tried to put it in the RSS feed–not the campaign blog, but the feed for all news about the campaign. And I couldn’t do it.

I can understand that, because it’s like taking bad news about Microsoft and putting it on the PR page at Microsoft.com. But maybe you should do that, because maybe the right thing is not what you want the customer to hear but what an educated customer would want to know. And if the Dean campaign had done that, then while the networks were playing the scream over and over, readers could have gone to one channel where there was a real honest perspective.