Year: 2004

  • See you in SF tonight?

    I’ll be at the Technorati Party in SF, Thursday Oct 28 party this evening. I never added it to my Upcoming.org event calendar feed since I wasn’t sure it was OK to enter it over there. I’m still looking for a good virtual book tour management system! I may stick a box of my books…

  • Is Kos a public figure?

    House Majority Whip Tom DeLay notes that Daily Kos is supporting his opponent, Mr. Morrison (one of the Kos Dozen), asserting “Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters against the U.S. in Iraq.” Markos laughsthis off (Daily Kos :: TX-22:…

  • Extreme democracy in the house

    The essay collection, Extreme Democracy, edited by Mitch Ratliffe and Jon Lebkowsky, has been coming out in PDF form published via the book’s blog. (I imagine there’s a wiki in the works as well.) Adina Levin’s chapter on Campaign Tools should be required reading for any activist. (Now I’m off to Personal Democracy Forum to…

  • Dropping Props* for Eminem (of Battleground Detroit, MI)

    *Props, i.e., proper respect This from Rolling Stone: [BTW, the post-11/2 dates don’t mean anything. The song will get its play–after this “leak”–before the election, and the issue of the magazine (despite its “cover date”) will also be out.] Eminem Talks Bush Song Rapper calls Iraq war “mess,” blames president Eminem’s upcoming album, Encore, due…

  • The final push

    Looking for something to do? I got this message from Dan Robinson (lately working on Advokit) last week. He’s good people: For me this project is all about empowerment of the grassroots. That Dean thing – the real legacy of our work over the last year and a half. AdvoKit is designed to bring people…

  • Coolness quotient for cities based on blogs, craigslist, Upcoming, and Meetup

    Rob Goodspeed correlates creativity and online culture on his blog (On "Cool Cities" and Blogs): My theory: cities with the richest local online culture (measured in number of blogs, and use of a select group of other geographically-bound websites) will reflect those cities with the highest numbers of creative class people. He also notes that…

  • The here and now versus the hereafter

    Both sides in this election have an X factor — for the Democrats it’s arguably (as has been noted elsewhere on Edgewise) the young, their fear for their futures. In particular, its their fear of an impending draft. They’re voting for their lives. Polls consistently show this group of young voters as the Kerry’s strongest…

  • Lessons learned from the Sinclair boycott

    Jon Stahl looks at the success of the online campaign to punish the Sinclair TV network for planning to make its affiliates air an anti-Kerry film under the rubric of news (A new network takes on an old one… and wins!). The network aired a watered-down, balanced show that included clips of a pro-Kerry film…

  • Towards a more nuanced view of the role of blogs in political journalism

    Over at Personal Democracy Forum (disclosure: I am a contributing editor there), Jed Miller takes issue with the sensationalism in the way that blogs have been covered in the media this season (It’s a Spitball! It’s a Filter!): Maybe I’m oversensitive after all the is-not/is-too-ism of the political season, but it seems to me that…

  • Inkwell interview in full swing

    Just a reminder that a public interview is underway in the Well’s Inkwell conference (The Power of Many: Many in the inkwell). So far, the discussion has been pretty wide ranging and everyone is welcome to participate.

  • Social media the next killer platform?

    Adam Bosworth writes: The platform of this decade isn’t going to be around controlling hardware resources and rich UI. Nor do I think you’re going to be able to charge for the platform per se. Instead, it is going to be around access to community, collaboration, and content. And it is going to be mass…

  • You lose 300 tons and what do you get?

    Please allow me to aggrandize myself, but my Monkey Vortex cohorts have scripted and produced a two-minute playlet called Sympathy for the W. I was given a cowriting credit but that overstates the case. That is me on lead vocals, though. I know, I know. Don’t quit your day job. Cruel of you to say…

  • Challenging the ‘undecided’ majority

    All this talk about the dwindling undecideds and their seeming inability to get with the polarization program has led me to think that maybe the sense of urgency that is driving both left and right activists this year is a form of common ground we can build on. Maybe I should try to get my…

  • Too many realities?

    I’ve always felt that presidential elections are, on one level, a competition between narratives. In one sense, people vote for a story, not necessarily for a protagonist or even an ending. We’ve seen that supporters of the two parties each are looking at almost entirely different realities. Last Sunday the Suskind article in the Times…

  • Why not tag everything?

    It seems that logging is a no-brainer. Systems already can do journaling and to the computer (by which I mean a central processing unit) everything happens in a totally linear way as it is. The real trick of what we today call blogging is to determine what information to make public to anyone, what information…

  • Encouraging Report Today Re: “The Kids Are Alright”

    Poll Finds Pro-Kerry Vote Fever at Colleges LA Times “[A]ccording to a poll released Thursday by Harvard University…84% of students said they would ‘definitely be voting’ this year, compared with 50% who said so in the spring of 2000.” “The poll surveyed…210 campuses in 48 states. Students…preferred Kerry over Bush, 52% to 39%….The Massachusetts senator…

  • Many in the inkwell

    My interview with Dan Gillmor in the Well’s public Inkwell conference has come to a close and Jon Lebkowsky’s interview with me in that same venue has now begun, concurrent with Lisa Goldman’s interview with Farai Chideya of Your Call Radio. We’ll be popping up in each other’s interviews as our topics are nicely interrelated.…

  • Since you asked

    Yes, I do have a birthday coming up, the big four-oh on October 30. (That will also be the seventh anniversary of this journal – w00t). People never know what to get for me, but this year it’s easy. First of all, the perfect gift for me is to buy a copy of my book.…

  • They're discussing this book on the Omidyar Network

    Aldon Hynes, who reviewed my book at Amazon and on his Orient Lodge weblog also started a discussion about the book in the book club group of the Omidyar Network. Soon afterward, Marnie Webb from CompuMentor and Tech Soup and N-Ten (whom I met in person when we appeared on a panel together at the…

  • FYI

    Washington Post [T]he Indian Health Service, was created by treaties drawn more than a century ago that promised quality health care (along with quality education and decent housing) for every Native American in exchange for the federal government’s taking vast swaths of Indian land. But the health service, run by the Department of Health and…

  • Resurrecting old to-don'ts

    Haven’t posted any to-dones in a long time, so there are so many they’d make our heads explode. Here’s a “classic” from just a little over two years ago – interesting all the already obsolete software brand names i was working on at the time (Radio Free Blogistan): Tuesday, October 15, 2002 To don’t Things…