[00:00.860 --> 00:01.340]  ...themselves.
[00:01.500 --> 00:02.920]  And so, let's welcome the panel.
[00:03.400 --> 00:03.740]  Thank you.
[00:09.610 --> 00:10.330]  Thank you.
[00:11.330 --> 00:13.010]  As she said, I'm Brad Johnson.
[00:13.350 --> 00:17.110]  And real briefly, we'll just go and introduce ourselves.
[00:17.410 --> 00:24.990]  I, my history is, I guess, this is now the third hope I think I've been to.
[00:25.170 --> 00:25.450]  Maybe.
[00:25.630 --> 00:26.550]  I don't really remember.
[00:26.630 --> 00:27.930]  They all kind of blur into one another.
[00:28.390 --> 00:39.330]  And in 2002, I talked about the book that I co-wrote, which was Technomanifestos, which was kind of a history of computing and the Internet that had led us up to 2002.
[00:39.930 --> 00:55.050]  And now we're in 2004 where it seems that the presidential campaign and election is kind of bringing all of the technology and societal issues that, you know, we end up having to care about have kind of come to a head.
[00:55.890 --> 01:03.070]  And just, that's, I'm, right now, I'm volunteering, live up in Boston, volunteering with the Democratic National Convention.
[01:03.470 --> 01:19.690]  And I'm here speaking completely as a private citizen, and not in any way representative of the issues, concerns, beliefs, attitudes, or anything that has anything to do with the Democratic National Committee, party, candidates, candidates committees,
[01:20.030 --> 01:21.750]  or anything like that.
[01:21.750 --> 01:26.310]  So don't even think of believing me in anything I say.
[01:26.690 --> 01:33.590]  So I'd just like to start and let, this is Adam Mordecai, Matt Stoller, and Will Atone, and let them introduce themselves.
[01:33.790 --> 01:35.610]  And I'll start off with Adam Mordecai.
[01:38.480 --> 01:40.340]  I need to get the mics up.
[01:41.300 --> 01:41.500]  Hello.
[01:41.840 --> 01:42.200]  There we go.
[01:42.260 --> 01:42.560]  There we go.
[01:43.200 --> 01:44.600]  My name is Adam Mordecai.
[01:44.860 --> 01:47.780]  I was, worked on the Howard Dean campaign.
[01:48.840 --> 01:51.380]  I wasn't in politics before any of this.
[01:51.540 --> 01:52.520]  I've never voted before.
[01:52.680 --> 01:53.520]  I'm 28 years old.
[01:53.900 --> 01:57.880]  And just kind of, you know, Bush awakened me, and then Dean kept me going.
[01:58.380 --> 02:03.780]  And I was with the campaign helping in blogging up until there was this big scream thing.
[02:03.980 --> 02:05.380]  I don't know if anyone heard about that.
[02:05.700 --> 02:20.680]  And after, since then, I've been working with a new organization run by Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's ex-campaign manager called Change for America, that's going to try to create sort of a grassroots activist Yahoo site for everybody to collectively work.
[02:20.820 --> 02:23.340]  Oh yeah, that's Trippi's new book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
[02:23.720 --> 02:31.280]  It's about how the Internet revolution will change the paradigm in politics, and how it's going to bring it back to the people slowly over time.
[02:31.500 --> 02:33.760]  We're taking baby steps now, and how it will progress from here.
[02:39.840 --> 02:40.360]  Hi.
[02:40.360 --> 02:47.640]  My name is Matt Stoller, and I was working in a software company.
[02:48.400 --> 02:53.780]  I was bored one day, and I started blogging, mostly in the political space.
[02:54.000 --> 02:58.200]  I did vote in 2000, but beyond that, I really hadn't done anything political.
[02:59.520 --> 03:08.620]  I got very heavily politicized as sort of the political scene got crazier and crazier, and started working as a volunteer for John Kerry.
[03:09.340 --> 03:20.540]  And then I went to the Draft Clark movement, which was an online movement, using blogs and various types of tools to organize people to support Wesley Clark.
[03:21.060 --> 03:30.160]  After that, I produced a public radio show and blog called The Blogging of the President, which was perhaps a bit too hopeful for what has happened subsequently.
[03:30.660 --> 03:36.640]  And now I am, like Brad, volunteering at the convention to help them with their blogger strategy.
[03:36.920 --> 03:45.180]  Nothing that I say represents anything that the convention or Democrats actually have to say.
[03:45.500 --> 03:47.520]  These are all my opinions as a private citizen.
[03:48.300 --> 03:50.240]  And so you shouldn't believe me either.
[03:51.420 --> 03:55.180]  But you can be assured that if we were representing the Democratic Party, we would be wearing ties.
[03:55.680 --> 03:56.440]  So there we go.
[03:57.900 --> 04:00.300]  And hi, I'm William Attundee.
[04:00.700 --> 04:01.940]  I run a couple websites.
[04:02.360 --> 04:05.600]  One is complacent.org, which has been around for about five years.
[04:05.640 --> 04:13.220]  And it's kind of a... it's not quite a blog, but we regularly update with Culture Jam stunts, video, and parties on the political sphere for a long time.
[04:13.680 --> 04:20.620]  But this summer really focused on counterconvention.org, which you guys might have heard the Republicans are coming to New York State, in a couple months.
[04:20.980 --> 04:24.940]  And we're organizing a pretty large response to them.
[04:25.020 --> 04:28.360]  We even have posters if anybody wants some.
[04:29.140 --> 04:34.900]  But once we leave here, the Republicans are coming and sitting in the same chairs you're in right now.
[04:35.100 --> 04:36.740]  So it's an exciting moment for New York City.
[04:37.000 --> 04:45.880]  And my main interest around blogging and this whole blogosphere is just the democratization of news, the control of media, and really getting our own voice out there.
[04:45.920 --> 04:51.840]  Because the mainstream media, as we all are aware, are interested in their own ends and not so much ours.
[04:52.040 --> 04:53.620]  So that's kind of our main focus.
[04:55.600 --> 04:56.160]  All right.
[04:56.300 --> 05:02.920]  So I just want to start a little briefly with kind of the background of the world that's gotten us to this point.
[05:03.080 --> 05:11.960]  And then we're just going to talk a little bit about the issues and then open the floor up to questions and probably extended commentary from you guys.
[05:12.580 --> 05:17.340]  So the history of the conventions and the kind of the two-party system.
[05:17.780 --> 05:32.580]  I mean, the first democratic convention, and I'll just kind of give the history of the democratic convention both as an example and because that's largely what we'll be talking about, at least at first, is that the first democratic national convention was held in 1832 in Baltimore.
[05:32.580 --> 05:34.760]  And the first several ones were held actually in Baltimore.
[05:35.120 --> 05:38.500]  First convention, Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were the ticket.
[05:39.860 --> 05:46.220]  And back then, the size of the delegations were actually dependent on the distance the states were from Baltimore.
[05:46.700 --> 05:49.900]  So, you know, if you were closer, you could bring more people, I guess.
[05:50.220 --> 05:53.360]  So they didn't have to pay that much for their transportation or something.
[05:54.480 --> 05:59.760]  And 1840, they introduced the platform for the first time in the convention.
[06:00.340 --> 06:07.100]  1844 was the first time that it took multiple ballots to elect the candidate.
[06:07.260 --> 06:12.500]  In other words, essentially, it was the first time there was a real fight over who was going to be the democratic candidate.
[06:13.840 --> 06:21.960]  1848, the Democratic National Committee came into existence as the organization that handled the party's affairs in between the conventions.
[06:22.560 --> 06:34.020]  And then you had the Civil War, where people just, like, basically, the Southern Democrats split off and kind of, you know, were a little pissed off that the Northern Democrats thought that slavery was bad.
[06:35.040 --> 06:38.840]  And then, you kind of, things kind of settled down.
[06:39.100 --> 06:41.700]  The Democrats kept on nominating people who weren't going to win.
[06:41.960 --> 06:47.440]  Then Roosevelt came along and then he, the only way that, you know, he lost was dying.
[06:47.440 --> 07:03.260]  So, then we get up to 1968, which was kind of a real crazy, crazy convention where you had, I mean, television introducing political campaigns in, like, 1952 was the first one where it had any effect.
[07:03.500 --> 07:07.520]  That was the first time that there were essentially TV political spots.
[07:07.520 --> 07:21.580]  But 1968 was probably the, either the height or the nadir is how you look at it as the effect of television on conventions where you had a floor fight going on inside the convention where there are people battling over who's going to become the nominee.
[07:21.580 --> 07:24.120]  Then outside, you had literal riots.
[07:24.400 --> 07:47.920]  You had about 12,000 Chicago police, about 1,500 people from the Army and National Guard, plus 1,000 Secret Service agents mixing up with the Yippies and just every single possible protest group in, you know, even like Patrick Buchanan was down there at the Democratic National Convention that time.
[07:47.920 --> 07:48.800]  He was wearing the suit.
[07:49.720 --> 07:58.160]  And, I mean, it was a crazy, crazy time and it made the Democrats look extraordinarily bad and the Republican National Convention at the same time was pretty crazy.
[07:58.300 --> 08:14.100]  And pretty much after that was really the point at which the powers that be realized that, if you wanted to, your convention had better be totally pre-planned, pre-scripted, and pre-ordained.
[08:14.100 --> 08:26.880]  So, because the whole thing is that while an unscripted convention makes good TV from the perspective of the press, it makes terrible TV from the perspective of a political candidate or party.
[08:27.460 --> 08:49.560]  And that kind of pulled us to today where the conventions are, at least from the perspective of, you know, the general public and the media and even the people inside the party, that it's primarily essentially a coronation ceremony, you know, kind of a media event where you're in the vein of,
[08:49.660 --> 08:51.460]  like, the Oscars or Emmys or something.
[08:52.640 --> 09:01.120]  And it raises this whole question, well, you know, why should there be 15,000 members of the media covering this event?
[09:01.680 --> 09:03.140]  And that's something we're going to talk about.
[09:03.560 --> 09:07.880]  And then at the same time, and starting, obviously, much more...
[09:07.880 --> 09:14.020]  Well, no, really starting at the same time, you have kind of essentially the history that's led us up to this kind of world of blogs or whatever you want to call them.
[09:14.020 --> 09:32.360]  Where, I mean, the roots, especially when you talk about the world of political, you know, this kind of open political press, it starts around the Revolutionary, before the Revolutionary War, with the pamphleteering that went on there where people would just put out incendiary tracks that just,
[09:32.380 --> 09:34.600]  you know, trashed their opponents.
[09:34.600 --> 09:38.800]  And at the same time, talked about, like, major, huge political ideas.
[09:39.080 --> 09:40.540]  They used pseudonyms.
[09:40.700 --> 09:41.980]  They, you know, they published semi-innoniously.
[09:43.020 --> 09:48.200]  They traded columns in all these different papers that were published all over the place.
[09:48.380 --> 09:59.320]  And, I mean, the thing we've got to recognize is that you have this very open and free dialogue existing within the world of, essentially, the, you know, your upper-middle-class white men.
[09:59.320 --> 10:10.020]  And, which, you know, and so that's, but at the same time, within that world, it was astoundingly free and pretty unfettered.
[10:10.460 --> 10:23.420]  And then you kind of pull up and we get the, coming up, you know, late 70s, the introduction of the first BBSs, you know, BBS 8 and Chicago by Ward Christensen.
[10:23.420 --> 10:29.480]  And then you have FidoNet kind of pulling all the BBSs together in the early 80s.
[10:30.060 --> 10:36.520]  Kind of switching over to the web, you know, and all the BBS systems pretty much die with the introduction of the web and Mosaic.
[10:36.820 --> 10:39.160]  And then, you know, Netscape in 95, 96.
[10:40.840 --> 10:43.360]  And Slashdot shows up around that time.
[10:43.760 --> 10:50.080]  You also had, like, Jason's Links from the Underground, which is kind of like the first site where somebody's like, I'm just going to put my entire personal life on the web.
[10:51.440 --> 10:59.740]  And then with the introduction of kind of blogging software around 2000, you get this huge explosion.
[11:00.040 --> 11:13.420]  And also as more and more kind of normal people join the web and discover it and you have a whole generation of people who, you know, I'm this crazy generation that didn't grow up with AOL accounts.
[11:13.420 --> 11:19.620]  And so now you have, what, hundreds of thousands of people on LiveJournal and using blogger.com.
[11:19.760 --> 11:22.000]  And, I mean, there's probably millions of these sites now.
[11:22.940 --> 11:37.600]  And at least some of them are political and a number of them have real, have had a real impact in covering things like the 2000 recount and just, you know, and all of the stuff that's going on today in the campaigns.
[11:37.600 --> 11:53.500]  And then you also have the introduction with the Howard Dean campaign basically of a campaign that the web and its weblog are inextricably linked with its, the campaign success and perhaps its downfall.
[11:54.180 --> 12:07.900]  And that kind of brings us up to today real briefly in terms of now we have, so now basically any, if you're a candidate, especially if you're a Democratic candidate and you're running for office somewhere, your website probably has a weblog, well, you know,
[12:08.340 --> 12:11.140]  you definitely have a website, probably have a weblog of some sort.
[12:12.360 --> 12:26.140]  You know, the Democratic National Convention is credentialing, like, something about, about 30 bloggers, which is, if you think about it, and what's funny is, is that it's actually this big deal and there's all these posts and news stories about it, but the funny thing is,
[12:26.180 --> 12:30.820]  is there are 15,000 members of the media coming to the convention.
[12:30.820 --> 12:48.300]  And, you know, so we're talking about a few, a handful, a few dozen of these, these people that, you know, and, and that's kind of in some sense, I mean, you know, maybe from my perspective, it's the only story, but it, it's, it's seen as this great shining hope of some kind of new thing.
[12:48.680 --> 12:50.800]  And it's a, it's a really interesting question.
[12:50.940 --> 12:59.380]  It makes you kind of wonder what the whole point of the institution is, and both the kind of the, the sadness and the hope of all of it.
[12:59.680 --> 13:10.680]  But that's all I'm going to say, really, because I don't really have any real, I don't, I don't, I've not actually really done anything useful like any of these people here, so I'm going to let them start talking about things.
[13:10.900 --> 13:28.000]  And I'd just like Adam to kind of talk a little more about how he sees the role of blogging in the kind of the 2004 campaign, both from his personal experience with Howard Dean, and then we'll kind of lead up into the convention, and then the Republican convention,
[13:28.180 --> 13:30.280]  and just start talking about things.
[13:32.560 --> 13:40.120]  Yeah, when, when I started joining, I joined the campaign in around June full time, and, you know, the blog became this huge thing.
[13:40.340 --> 13:40.760]  2003.
[13:41.160 --> 13:42.200]  Did I say 2004?
[13:42.560 --> 13:42.740]  Yeah.
[13:42.980 --> 13:43.380]  Oh, okay.
[13:44.440 --> 13:57.480]  2003 of June, I, I joined the campaign, and, you know, we just started getting a blog, and the blog was different than any other campaign had ever done before, because people were allowed to use their own voice, and they were able to use their opinions,
[13:57.540 --> 14:06.360]  whereas, you know, every other campaign, if you want to say something, you have to make sure it's on message, you have to make sure that everybody agrees with it and approves it about 30 different ways before something happens.
[14:07.080 --> 14:14.540]  In the Dean campaign, people were allowed to say what they wanted about their opinions, about what they wanted to say, and it, it made a huge difference.
[14:14.640 --> 14:22.420]  All of a sudden, we had this community on the blog of, you know, thousands of commenters who were sitting there every day, participating, taking part interactively with the campaign.
[14:23.680 --> 14:33.220]  You know, we'd raise... you know, the politicians, they never really understood blogging or anything like it until money got involved.
[14:33.340 --> 14:40.560]  When they realized that they could, you know, get obscene amounts of money from this, all of a sudden they woke up to it and saw what we were doing.
[14:41.480 --> 14:44.060]  You know, we'd post something early in the day.
[14:44.180 --> 14:49.180]  Our first big thing was, I don't know how many people are familiar with it, but we put a bat up on one day.
[14:49.340 --> 15:00.900]  There was an idea given to us by a commenter who said, you know, we should put up something to compare to... that Dick Cheney was going to have a $250,000 fundraising lunch with $2,000 a plate.
[15:01.060 --> 15:12.540]  So, we put up a bat as kind of our thermometer and we said, okay, we're going to see how if we can match Dick Cheney by Monday when he has his lunch and we'll start ours on Friday.
[15:13.300 --> 15:17.460]  And by Saturday, we had matched him for $250,000.
[15:17.660 --> 15:21.140]  And by Monday, we had made over $500,000.
[15:21.700 --> 15:28.940]  All from donations under $100, all from people who were just sick and tired of the same old rhetoric, the same old routine, who are ready to hear something different.
[15:31.280 --> 15:35.900]  The blogs since then, obviously, you know, our campaign has since died.
[15:36.140 --> 15:42.280]  But when the Kerry campaign put up a blog, you know, to match ours, they aren't doing it the same way.
[15:42.460 --> 15:45.240]  The way they're doing it is they're mostly just press releases.
[15:46.120 --> 15:55.000]  You know, but people aren't allowed to still give their own opinion because in the campaign environment, it's too dangerous for the mainstream candidates to say anything.
[15:55.260 --> 16:00.520]  You know, if anything's off message, the Republicans will take it and twist it and turn it, make it into something dangerous.
[16:00.840 --> 16:04.600]  You know, like it just becomes a pretty crazy thing.
[16:04.800 --> 16:12.480]  So, you know, but blogging is slowly making its way in the world and we're starting to get attention to the right things, making our way.
[16:12.900 --> 16:14.400]  People like, you know, people are...
[16:14.400 --> 16:16.980]  Blogs are starting to have an effect on politics.
[16:17.160 --> 16:19.960]  For example, the Trent Lott affair, I don't know how many people are aware of what happened with that.
[16:20.420 --> 16:22.580]  Trent Lott said that he really wished that...
[16:23.740 --> 16:24.380]  Strom Thurmond.
[16:24.420 --> 16:29.220]  Strom Thurmond, we wish that Strom Thurmond had won all those years ago because then the country would be great.
[16:29.440 --> 16:32.080]  And, you know, Strom was running on the segregation party ticket.
[16:34.060 --> 16:39.900]  And if it hadn't been for about 50 different bloggers all talking at the same time saying, look, this is racist.
[16:40.080 --> 16:41.360]  This is totally ridiculous.
[16:41.740 --> 16:50.560]  You know, he'd still be... Trent Lott would still be in that seat of power, but because of the blogs, we were able to remove him from power, put him back down where he belongs somewhat.
[16:50.700 --> 16:54.000]  We haven't got him totally out of office yet, but, you know, he's not in a position of power anymore.
[16:54.180 --> 16:57.520]  So the blogs are slowly starting to make a difference in campaigns.
[17:01.160 --> 17:02.980]  So how many of you guys are Democrats?
[17:03.400 --> 17:03.820]  Just curious.
[17:05.660 --> 17:06.240]  All right.
[17:06.800 --> 17:09.320]  How many of you are voted in the primaries?
[17:11.920 --> 17:13.280]  That's a fair number.
[17:13.500 --> 17:20.500]  Well, I guess the real question is how many of you, like, didn't vote, you know, I don't know, like, in the primaries four years ago or whatever?
[17:20.780 --> 17:26.460]  I mean, like, or is this... how many people is this the first time that you're actually motivated to vote?
[17:28.480 --> 17:29.460]  Yeah, the people in the back.
[17:29.600 --> 17:31.620]  More specifically, who here voted in 2000?
[17:34.420 --> 17:34.820]  Okay.
[17:34.820 --> 17:35.600]  Who didn't?
[17:38.220 --> 17:38.720]  All right.
[17:41.080 --> 17:42.180]  Who voted for Nader?
[17:42.400 --> 17:43.100]  Who voted for Nader?
[17:43.980 --> 17:44.420]  All right.
[17:44.620 --> 17:44.780]  Wow.
[17:44.940 --> 17:45.020]  Okay.
[17:45.160 --> 17:45.980]  So fair number.
[17:47.560 --> 17:48.100]  All right.
[17:49.060 --> 17:50.240]  We're being interactive now.
[17:50.580 --> 17:56.220]  I had a whole nice PowerPoint presentation that I designed, and it had pictures and everything, but I guess I won't show it.
[17:56.220 --> 17:56.520]  Oh, no.
[17:56.620 --> 17:56.780]  Come on.
[17:56.880 --> 17:57.300]  It's good.
[17:57.760 --> 17:58.080]  Oh, really?
[17:58.280 --> 17:58.420]  Yeah.
[17:59.380 --> 17:59.720]  All right.
[17:59.860 --> 18:00.760]  Well, I don't know.
[18:00.980 --> 18:03.240]  How many of you guys think that there's too much money in politics?
[18:04.360 --> 18:07.760]  So you think that money distorts the political scene somehow?
[18:09.300 --> 18:13.220]  I think that's... it's a fairly widely held... oh, cool.
[18:13.840 --> 18:14.220]  Love it.
[18:14.900 --> 18:20.640]  It's a fairly widely held sentiment that there's too much money in politics, and it's distorting our political system in some way.
[18:22.160 --> 18:24.800]  We have to ask why it is that money is such a problem.
[18:25.140 --> 18:28.020]  And it wasn't necessarily as bad a problem a couple of years ago.
[18:28.480 --> 18:32.680]  And the reason I think most people understand it is, is because money buys media time.
[18:33.180 --> 18:35.720]  And as a politician, you need to get your message out.
[18:36.000 --> 18:43.400]  So you need to get money in so you can buy TV time, broadcast time, so you can then get the votes to get elected.
[18:43.620 --> 18:50.040]  And as media times become more and more expensive, money has proportionally become more and more important in politics.
[18:50.500 --> 18:57.620]  But what's happened is the authenticity and the relationships between politicians and their constituents have declined in importance.
[18:58.200 --> 18:59.760]  You can see this in the convention.
[19:00.620 --> 19:04.280]  I'm going to read you what some bloggers have said about conventioneering.
[19:14.570 --> 19:17.150]  First of all, what we're doing for blogs, there's the nice picture.
[19:17.710 --> 19:19.130]  We actually, the convention has a blog.
[19:19.250 --> 19:20.350]  It's called Boston D Party.
[19:24.530 --> 19:26.950]  Bloggers are actually going to be credentialed for the first time.
[19:27.470 --> 19:30.870]  They're going to come into the hall and they're going to talk to delegates.
[19:31.010 --> 19:31.850]  They're going to be treated like media.
[19:32.690 --> 19:34.090]  How many of you guys blog, by the way?
[19:35.590 --> 19:38.830]  How many of you guys read political blogs at all?
[19:39.730 --> 19:43.550]  Yeah, so you get your... Okay, that's a fairly savvy audience then.
[19:44.250 --> 19:44.870]  Probably why they're here.
[19:44.990 --> 19:47.830]  Yeah, you guys are smart, I guess.
[19:50.410 --> 19:52.590]  Anyway, we're having bloggers come for the first time.
[19:53.250 --> 19:56.390]  And they're probably going to be bloggers going to be outside the convention.
[19:56.950 --> 19:59.730]  Delegates are probably... Well, some delegates are definitely going to be blogging.
[19:59.830 --> 20:01.570]  There might be a lot more delegates blogging.
[20:01.710 --> 20:06.130]  And what this is going to do is it's going to transform the story of the convention somehow.
[20:06.210 --> 20:15.750]  Because you're going to have people who aren't in professional media jobs that are just telling their stories and have equal platforms to the world as other online media.
[20:15.850 --> 20:20.310]  And that's going to present a real challenge to traditional media and political narrative.
[20:20.770 --> 20:22.490]  But nobody really knows what's going to happen.
[20:22.830 --> 20:24.210]  I'm kind of excited to see.
[20:26.590 --> 20:28.750]  There is a script to conventions.
[20:29.490 --> 20:30.590]  Because it is very dangerous.
[20:32.150 --> 20:33.390]  1968 was a good example.
[20:33.550 --> 20:34.910]  But you can find a lot of examples.
[20:35.230 --> 20:42.330]  92 when Pat Buchanan gave a speech that was very right-wing and anti-immigrant, anti-gay.
[20:43.470 --> 20:46.630]  Somebody made the comment that it sounded better in its original German.
[20:47.550 --> 20:52.770]  And it really embarrassed George Bush, the other one.
[20:52.910 --> 20:53.750]  And he lost.
[20:53.910 --> 20:55.470]  And some people point to that as a problem.
[20:55.650 --> 20:58.110]  So conventions have really become about control.
[20:58.450 --> 20:59.410]  There is a script.
[20:59.610 --> 21:01.310]  And this is what some bloggers are saying about it.
[21:01.370 --> 21:06.350]  They're calling it, quote, a worthless infomercial or just entertainment for big donors and parties.
[21:21.090 --> 21:22.130]  Oh, cool.
[21:24.310 --> 21:25.950]  This is the picture right there.
[21:26.310 --> 21:27.110]  Cut and paste.
[21:27.250 --> 21:27.450]  Love it.
[21:27.510 --> 21:28.370]  You worked hard on that.
[21:28.550 --> 21:28.670]  Yeah.
[21:29.330 --> 21:30.050]  That's the blog.
[21:33.030 --> 21:39.630]  Anyway, so this is from a blog called PressThink, which is the smartest blog on PressThink.org.
[21:39.630 --> 21:43.430]  It's the smartest blog on media criticism and politics that I know of.
[21:43.750 --> 21:53.350]  But basically, Jay Rosen, who is a professor at NYU in journalism, talks about the scripted nature of conventions and what that means.
[21:53.950 --> 21:57.690]  And essentially, nobody really understands why there are conventions.
[21:57.890 --> 22:02.910]  And bloggers are going to have the opportunity to rewrite the narrative.
[22:03.250 --> 22:10.770]  This is somebody who's comparing conventions to reality shows and comparing them unfavorably.
[22:11.070 --> 22:13.050]  Now, I don't agree with that comparison.
[22:13.370 --> 22:16.010]  But it's interesting that this is the discourse.
[22:16.150 --> 22:19.270]  This is what people are talking about in the media sphere about conventions.
[22:20.150 --> 22:25.590]  And so there really is an opportunity here to rewrite what a convention is about.
[22:25.750 --> 22:37.370]  And because bloggers are not part of the traditional media establishment, and they're not part of the traditional political establishment in a lot of ways, I think you're going to see some really innovative coverage from them.
[22:37.510 --> 22:40.730]  Because they're going to tell you about, like, who they're meeting, what it's like.
[22:41.750 --> 22:46.130]  They're going to look behind, you know, in the nooks and crannies.
[22:46.190 --> 22:47.750]  And maybe there won't be anything interesting there.
[22:47.930 --> 22:49.090]  But I think there will be.
[22:49.210 --> 22:52.330]  And just to sort of go on a techno-utopian kick for a second here.
[22:52.590 --> 22:54.090]  This is probably the right place to do that.
[22:55.410 --> 22:59.910]  There is a real challenge to a broadcast infrastructure going on right now, as you guys know.
[23:00.850 --> 23:02.430]  Most of you read political blogs.
[23:02.430 --> 23:03.610]  You can comment on them.
[23:03.730 --> 23:04.750]  A lot of you have blogs.
[23:04.930 --> 23:10.890]  And that represents a sea change in how people can approach politics and how people can approach their lives.
[23:11.650 --> 23:17.410]  And what this is going to do is it's going to return conventions in the next 10, 20 years.
[23:17.590 --> 23:18.250]  It's going to return...
[23:18.250 --> 23:24.510]  It's going to move them away from TV-dominated politics and towards human stories, personal stories, and party connections.
[23:24.970 --> 23:27.230]  That's my kind of sense anyway.
[23:27.330 --> 23:31.130]  Anyway, these are two links that are pretty... The second one is a blog.
[23:31.270 --> 23:33.150]  So if you want to get any information about...
[23:33.150 --> 23:33.290]  It is .org.
[23:33.530 --> 23:33.650]  What?
[23:35.010 --> 23:35.450]  .org.
[23:35.450 --> 23:36.410]  Yeah, it is actually.
[23:36.550 --> 23:37.350]  I guess I got the link wrong.
[23:39.190 --> 23:40.290]  It's PowerPoint's fault.
[23:43.640 --> 23:44.320]  There we go.
[23:45.660 --> 23:46.500]  Pressthink.org.
[23:46.680 --> 23:47.620]  It's a very good blog.
[23:47.700 --> 23:48.540]  They're going to be talking about this.
[23:48.720 --> 23:53.280]  And then the convention's blog is dems2004.org slash blog.
[23:53.920 --> 23:57.500]  And you can get a lot of information there.
[23:57.660 --> 24:01.080]  It's the first political... National Political Convention blog that has existed.
[24:02.100 --> 24:03.320]  So follow the blogs.
[24:03.380 --> 24:05.760]  When the convention comes, you're going to see some interesting stories.
[24:05.900 --> 24:07.720]  And you're going to be able to interact with the people that are there.
[24:08.320 --> 24:13.920]  And it's... I have to say, I think it's going to be very interesting watching... I mean, I think that...
[24:13.920 --> 24:15.700]  You know, it's what he said, the word innovative.
[24:15.920 --> 24:22.520]  And I think the irony is that the coverage of the blogs will, in some sense, be exactly the opposite of innovative.
[24:22.680 --> 24:32.960]  It'll simply be a return to what journalism is supposed to be, which is actually telling the stories of what happens and what most people are interested in learning about.
[24:33.300 --> 24:46.720]  And I think it'll be... I strongly expect that the... both the television and newspaper and radio outlets will see this as, you know, this... see this out as a threat.
[24:47.000 --> 24:53.480]  Not because the blogs... there's a lot of them, or, you know, at the convention, or because they have lots of money behind them.
[24:53.620 --> 24:57.020]  But just because it's going to be so obviously more interesting.
[24:57.400 --> 24:59.640]  And be used with so much less resources.
[24:59.880 --> 25:12.780]  And as we've seen, whether it's done in, like, the world of software or hardware, or, you know, in political spheres, there's going to be extremely strong backlash from the traditional media.
[25:12.880 --> 25:20.220]  And I think it'll be really interesting to see what the coverage of the coverage of the bloggers is going to be in the traditional media.
[25:21.860 --> 25:24.000]  Can I actually say something about that really quick?
[25:24.140 --> 25:26.180]  We're going to let Will talk, and then you can talk again.
[25:26.760 --> 25:28.220]  I like the hand-raising thing.
[25:28.320 --> 25:32.080]  Can we see again who in this room reads political blogs really quick?
[25:32.520 --> 25:32.920]  Okay.
[25:33.220 --> 25:35.620]  Who would trust those blogs over CNN?
[25:35.920 --> 25:36.820]  Those of you, raise your hands.
[25:37.400 --> 25:37.580]  Okay.
[25:37.680 --> 25:39.740]  Who would trust those blogs over Fox News?
[25:41.320 --> 25:41.720]  Okay.
[25:41.720 --> 25:44.740]  Everyone in the room, who thinks Fox News is mostly just full of shit?
[25:45.040 --> 25:45.680]  Anybody else?
[25:45.860 --> 25:46.020]  Okay.
[25:46.200 --> 25:47.380]  That's a pretty good majority.
[25:48.600 --> 25:51.080]  Because I think there's a whole other, beyond just the...
[25:54.220 --> 25:57.640]  There's a whole other story beyond what's going on inside the convention halls that's going to be happening.
[25:57.640 --> 26:03.780]  There's going to be a lot of kind of protests happening, especially around the Republican convention as well as the Boston.
[26:03.960 --> 26:10.400]  But I think around Bush there's a whole sphere of people really getting ready to rise up to get their voice heard.
[26:10.800 --> 26:12.740]  That's been ignored for the past four years.
[26:12.980 --> 26:17.740]  And I think the democratization of the news in that sense is really, really crucial.
[26:18.240 --> 26:22.120]  And we've already seen it because it's so easy for protests.
[26:22.380 --> 26:24.720]  I mean, there's a lot of real issues that we're standing up for.
[26:24.840 --> 26:28.320]  And it's so easy to be put into a little box by Fox News or CNN.
[26:28.860 --> 26:32.340]  And the biggest way we're going to combat that is with our own blogs and with our own voice.
[26:32.600 --> 26:37.860]  And just to give you a couple of links, there's rncwatch.org, which I don't know if anybody's seen yet.
[26:38.200 --> 26:41.940]  That's one of the main blogs following what's going on around the convention.
[26:41.940 --> 26:51.400]  And then also encounterconvention.org, we're going to be starting a project called I Am New York City, which is going to be telling the story of organizers on the ground building on issues.
[26:51.400 --> 27:01.020]  And it's going to feature people with AIDS, homeless people, youth organizers, old people, church people, who voices would otherwise just be lost in the shuffle.
[27:01.460 --> 27:05.200]  Because there's going to be a lot of attention with the pomp and circumstance within the convention halls.
[27:05.500 --> 27:12.280]  But with our blogs and with this new medium we have, we can really compete with CNN directly and tell our own stories.
[27:13.000 --> 27:19.260]  And I think that's going to be really crucial to tell not just the stories from within the convention halls, but what's happening on the street, which is going to be bigger.
[27:19.820 --> 27:21.960]  And I have a feeling just a little bit more exciting.
[27:22.200 --> 27:25.020]  Actually, can you also just talk a little bit about...
[27:25.020 --> 27:33.100]  There's the whole thing of kind of providing an alternative to the traditional media, but can you also just talk a little bit about how you essentially play the media?
[27:33.460 --> 27:37.360]  In other words, like, you know, organizations like Billionaires or Bush and stuff.
[27:37.360 --> 27:47.620]  People who recognize that the way that you get a message out is by, in some sense, you know, doing something that they'll show but that still lets you...
[27:48.180 --> 27:57.220]  Well, there's this sense of, you know, kind of viral campaigning and the idea of having a message that can't really be broken down by the media, which is a difficult thing.
[27:57.720 --> 27:59.380]  There's a group, Billionaires for Bush, right?
[27:59.560 --> 28:02.600]  You hear that name and you kind of... you hear the irony immediately.
[28:03.120 --> 28:11.220]  It's a bunch of people who dress up in tuxedos who go to every Bush thing and like, you know, four more wars and free the Forbes 400 and, you know, more test cuts for the wealthy.
[28:11.560 --> 28:14.760]  And that kind of stuff plays very well to the media and the media just eats it up.
[28:15.560 --> 28:17.640]  They're going on a cross-country tour in a limo.
[28:17.860 --> 28:18.000]  Yeah.
[28:18.500 --> 28:20.520]  I mean, and the thing is, is in perhaps...
[28:20.520 --> 28:24.000]  The funny thing is, is it's, you know, it's because the media, they...
[28:24.000 --> 28:25.600]  What they respond to is they respond to...
[28:26.520 --> 28:31.460]  Essentially, they respond to cynicism and irony because that's the way that they see the political process.
[28:32.300 --> 28:41.600]  And it's one of the most, I think, destructive things to a democracy when the press essentially doesn't believe in the institution.
[28:43.200 --> 28:57.080]  And actually to that, like, I think one of the most interesting contrasts in all of this is that if you just look at the conventions and you understand them as essentially television beasts, and if you look at those quotes that Jay Rosen was looking at,
[28:57.220 --> 28:58.600]  it's very clearly this is...
[28:58.600 --> 29:08.060]  If you look at the conventions through the eyes of what you get to see on television, and I won't even... I will only attack television because in theory if everybody owned...
[29:08.060 --> 29:17.740]  If, you know, if television was controlled in the same way that the Internet was controlled, it's quite likely that people would think that, you know, television is a great and democratizing medium.
[29:19.640 --> 29:20.120]  Right.
[29:20.380 --> 29:20.720]  Exactly.
[29:21.020 --> 29:26.280]  And, you know, and if public access, you know, there's public access and if...
[29:26.280 --> 29:28.320]  Can we see a show of hands of who watches public access?
[29:29.540 --> 29:29.840]  Right.
[29:30.320 --> 29:37.600]  And, you know, and for those four people, they probably get the same value out of that as reading the blogs and those things.
[29:37.800 --> 29:44.780]  And if 96% of us were raising our hands right there, then I think we'd see television in a completely different way.
[29:46.420 --> 29:47.400]  But... Oh, yeah.
[29:52.280 --> 29:54.980]  Well, so the question was, what about radio sources?
[29:55.180 --> 29:55.640]  Is NPR...
[29:55.640 --> 29:57.480]  Well, I mean, the thing is, is that...
[29:59.620 --> 30:02.640]  The way... Essentially, I mean, if you just look at the way that the...
[30:04.480 --> 30:09.260]  The broadcast frequencies are handed out, it's essentially the same in radio and television.
[30:09.280 --> 30:13.980]  In other words, it's controlled by a very few institutions.
[30:13.980 --> 30:31.600]  And, like, whether those institutions are explicitly corporate or whether they're, you know, institutions like NPR, the fact of the matter is, is that they're institutions that are designed to protect their existence and to prevent other people from getting onto the airwaves.
[30:31.600 --> 30:35.340]  Yeah, I think... I actually produced a show on public radio.
[30:36.020 --> 30:38.880]  And the real problem... NPR is not liberal.
[30:39.080 --> 30:40.020]  That's not true.
[30:40.320 --> 30:43.800]  It just... They're more responsible about coverage, but they aren't...
[30:43.800 --> 30:45.780]  There's no partisan balance on the radio.
[30:46.380 --> 30:54.580]  But the other problem with these media is not that they are owned by corporations, but that they're broadcast and that they're inherently disempowering.
[30:54.620 --> 30:56.500]  Because you're listening and you can't talk back.
[30:56.500 --> 30:59.340]  And they aren't being used in a way that lets you talk back.
[31:00.020 --> 31:02.460]  So one of the things that... Radio is like that.
[31:02.780 --> 31:04.080]  It's more conversational.
[31:04.260 --> 31:06.820]  It doesn't suck you in and turn you into a zombie the way that TV does.
[31:07.300 --> 31:11.720]  But it's still... You only have, you know, a couple of people on the radio.
[31:11.900 --> 31:13.120]  So it's a disempowering medium.
[31:13.420 --> 31:18.240]  And as such, it serves the politics of disempowerment and cynicism and apathy.
[31:18.240 --> 31:25.360]  The real promise of the Internet is in using these media to, you know, to have conversations.
[31:26.200 --> 31:27.760]  Television can be useful for that.
[31:27.860 --> 31:29.720]  Television can be a democratizing force.
[31:29.880 --> 31:33.380]  If it's used appropriately with other media that can produce dialogue.
[31:34.000 --> 31:38.060]  But the issue is not about who owns these media sources, although that is a problem.
[31:38.380 --> 31:46.400]  The issue is more about how the media sources are used to create a culture of consumerism and, you know, political apathy.
[31:46.400 --> 31:50.740]  An issue-driven politics as opposed to the participatory politics.
[31:51.600 --> 31:56.220]  And, you know, that's... So NPR is a better source for news.
[31:57.440 --> 32:00.400]  But there's still no dialogue going on or very little.
[32:00.600 --> 32:01.720]  Just in direct response.
[32:01.900 --> 32:03.060]  I mean, I think the issue...
[32:03.060 --> 32:08.320]  The reason why TV and radio is so commercialized is because of who owns it.
[32:08.640 --> 32:11.560]  I mean, we saw a few years ago that there was...
[32:12.120 --> 32:14.460]  the FCC opened up a small-band radio.
[32:14.720 --> 32:16.640]  And the Senate then closed it back down very quickly.
[32:17.300 --> 32:23.760]  I think small-band radio is kind of an interesting parallel to blogging, where people suddenly could, like, get their own voice out there.
[32:24.460 --> 32:31.200]  And because of the corporate interests and because of, you know, government control and who pays who, that got shut down very quickly.
[32:31.340 --> 32:32.540]  They can't really do that with the Internet.
[32:33.300 --> 32:35.480]  So I think it really is a matter of who owns it.
[32:35.480 --> 32:38.760]  I think that kind of defines how it works.
[32:38.860 --> 32:44.980]  And because the Internet is essentially decentralized, it becomes an essentially democratized information source.
[32:45.140 --> 32:46.620]  And that's its power, as we all know.
[32:47.320 --> 32:47.680]  Yeah.
[32:47.800 --> 32:48.280]  And just...
[32:48.280 --> 32:51.960]  If you have more questions, just keep on raising your hands and basically keep this as questions.
[32:52.200 --> 32:52.680]  Up front.
[32:53.480 --> 33:04.120]  I'm wondering if you see the Internet-powering blogs in the vast number of small blogs with 10, 15 readers or the few more centralized blogs with 100,000 readers.
[33:04.900 --> 33:11.120]  And the link to that, I guess, would be how you see sort of media figures, blogs, and how you see that impacted.
[33:12.180 --> 33:14.320]  And that seems going back to the whole kind of law thing.
[33:14.620 --> 33:21.500]  When the newspapers picked it up, they picked it up because of topic points, Melo and Joshua Marshall, who was someone they knew because he had a column.
[33:22.200 --> 33:22.660]  All right.
[33:23.040 --> 33:24.740]  Let me just repeat the question for...
[33:24.740 --> 33:26.560]  Because I assume the people in the back couldn't really hear that.
[33:26.700 --> 33:27.000]  Am I right?
[33:27.820 --> 33:40.260]  So, he was just kind of talking about whether we see the importance of blogs being in the fact that there are thousands of them, many of... or, you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, I think, these days.
[33:41.560 --> 33:45.120]  And, you know, the vast majority of them very small and have very small audiences.
[33:45.180 --> 33:58.980]  Or is the real importance that there are, you know, a few big players, like in the Trent Lott thing, the newspapers picked up the story, and the media picked up the story, largely in some sense due to the...
[33:58.980 --> 34:11.620]  or at least, you know, as so the theory goes, posited by the work by Joshua Michael Marshall, who's a reporter who has his own kind of personal weblog at TalkingPointsMemo.com.
[34:11.780 --> 34:12.380]  And so that was the question.
[34:12.760 --> 34:13.960]  Mordecai, you have some comments?
[34:14.900 --> 34:19.120]  Well, yeah, the... I think, you know, the big voices are...
[34:19.120 --> 34:20.640]  we need to have the big voices out there.
[34:20.740 --> 34:24.100]  I mean, it's... you know, there's gonna be big ones, and there's gonna be small ones, just like the media.
[34:24.340 --> 34:27.920]  You know, the Internet is kind of self... it's self-doing that.
[34:28.060 --> 34:31.900]  You know, based on the quality of the content is how much traffic you get.
[34:32.580 --> 34:43.560]  The really big blogs, Atrios, Daily Kos, you know, all those guys, they tend to get that kind of traffic because they have a lot of quality material on a wide variety of subjects.
[34:43.800 --> 34:53.300]  You know, there's more specialized blogs that also cover only certain subjects that tend to get smaller amounts of traffic, but each of them, you know, has their own thing that they can offer.
[34:54.500 --> 34:57.180]  All of them are slowly gaining more importance.
[34:57.360 --> 35:00.820]  Like the... you know, the current thing is Bush's draft record.
[35:01.640 --> 35:12.340]  Kevin Drum at WashingtonMonthly.com, he just kept pounding away at that thing and studying it and studying it and pushing it and pushing it and finally people like Alterman and other people started picking it up again.
[35:13.240 --> 35:20.800]  And then when Michael Moore went on, you know, Wes Clark's rally and said, Bush is a deserter, you know, it didn't really even make that much of a difference.
[35:20.960 --> 35:25.140]  But then Peter Jennings got really mad that he called him that and said, what do you mean the president's deserter?
[35:25.260 --> 35:25.720]  How dare you?
[35:26.420 --> 35:29.960]  Would you, you know, would you let Michael Moore represent you like that?
[35:30.000 --> 35:30.960]  And Clark said, I don't know.
[35:31.020 --> 35:31.540]  It's his opinion.
[35:31.700 --> 35:32.420]  He has the right to it.
[35:32.760 --> 35:37.100]  And once people started investigating it again, you know, it still had to go through the mainstream media to get there.
[35:37.100 --> 35:46.160]  But I think eventually are these, these multiple voices are out there that will, that are rising up, you know, they, they get, they're starting to really take note in the media.
[35:46.380 --> 36:00.300]  And media is also having a lot of trouble right now because, you know, like when the Dean campaign happened, people in the Dean campaign were very zealous about every newspaper article that came out and anything that was in the slightest way negative about Dean or wrong or incorrect.
[36:00.300 --> 36:06.360]  You know, people would crawl up these reporters' butts and just pound them with angry email after angry email.
[36:06.520 --> 36:08.980]  And blogs would, you know, critique every single article.
[36:09.260 --> 36:14.920]  And it was forcing these people to think about the way they write their reports and their articles.
[36:15.220 --> 36:18.740]  And it's slowly, I mean, granted, there's still a lot of laziness in the media right now.
[36:18.920 --> 36:21.720]  But I think it's, it's slowly changing the paradigm thanks to these blogs.
[36:21.720 --> 36:23.980]  I just want to real quickly have a little side note.
[36:24.120 --> 36:46.620]  I don't know if you guys heard the latest on the, the Bush Army military record or National Guard records is that they just, they just discovered that in, this is so the story goes, that in 1996 or 1997, his payroll records for the three months that he disappeared somehow got destroyed.
[36:46.900 --> 36:47.920]  And he is furious.
[36:48.220 --> 36:49.960]  He is really angry about that.
[36:49.960 --> 36:54.200]  They, they only just found out that this happened, uh, seven years ago.
[36:55.180 --> 36:58.440]  I know a way they can personally encounter the current person.
[36:58.840 --> 37:01.120]  And, uh, how did that work?
[37:01.480 --> 37:05.060]  When the block's campaign, she personally witnessed it.
[37:05.540 --> 37:06.760]  He was at Maureen Graydon.
[37:07.180 --> 37:09.360]  Well, we're, we're...
[37:09.360 --> 37:09.620]  Ew.
[37:09.980 --> 37:10.720]  You should blog that.
[37:10.720 --> 37:16.100]  You should, uh, talk to, uh, Matt and Will, uh, after they, after the talk and we'll...
[37:16.100 --> 37:20.660]  I, I want to actually touch on something you said, which is, which is, which is, I mean, this is crazy.
[37:20.820 --> 37:21.620]  I mean, this is just crazy.
[37:21.860 --> 37:23.940]  Like, oh, accidentally the records are destroyed.
[37:24.160 --> 37:25.800]  I mean, like, it's nuts.
[37:26.040 --> 37:28.660]  It's, this political environment is just, it's lunacy.
[37:28.820 --> 37:31.260]  And it's like we're living in a surreal world.
[37:32.040 --> 37:34.580]  But to your point, I mean, how are blogs impacting?
[37:34.740 --> 37:35.840]  Like, people like to look at numbers.
[37:35.980 --> 37:37.600]  How many people are reading it?
[37:37.700 --> 37:40.080]  But, how many people here read David Hackworth?
[37:40.740 --> 37:42.060]  Have heard of David Hackworth?
[37:42.260 --> 37:42.320]  Okay.
[37:43.000 --> 37:48.940]  David Hackworth is a military guy who's fought in, like, he, like, lied to get in the army when he was 15.
[37:49.200 --> 37:52.240]  And he's the, the most decorated soldier in the military.
[37:52.320 --> 37:54.100]  He's a real, he's like a soldier's soldier.
[37:54.400 --> 37:57.480]  And he runs a, it's like a blog type website for soldiers.
[37:58.340 --> 38:02.740]  Um, and, and so you can go there and you can find out what the troops are really thinking.
[38:03.400 --> 38:09.520]  Because of his website, the Abu Ghraib pictures got floated on 60 Minutes.
[38:09.620 --> 38:15.300]  The West Virginia family that had the pictures tried to go to major media outlets and they wouldn't listen.
[38:16.380 --> 38:20.560]  And they went to David Hackworth and he got them on 60 Minutes 2.
[38:21.060 --> 38:24.400]  And that was a really, really important thing to have happen.
[38:24.520 --> 38:29.660]  Now, it's not that the blogs broke that or that 60 Minutes 2 is unimportant.
[38:29.660 --> 38:32.580]  What it, what it really is suggesting is, it's like the blogs.
[38:32.740 --> 38:35.980]  It's suggestive of, uh, a changed power relationship.
[38:36.000 --> 38:42.580]  When a poor West Virginia soldier can delegitimize the American occupation of Iraq to a substantial number of people.
[38:42.760 --> 38:45.860]  Just because they have a digital camera and there are these websites around.
[38:46.080 --> 38:47.540]  So it's not a broadcast medium.
[38:47.960 --> 38:53.940]  And it doesn't, you, having big bloggers or not big bloggers or small bloggers isn't really the important kind of component.
[38:54.240 --> 38:55.780]  It's this issue of dialogue.
[38:56.120 --> 38:57.880]  And it, there's a forced dialogue there.
[38:58.000 --> 38:59.320]  It doesn't matter how big you are.
[38:59.320 --> 39:02.960]  If you aren't responsive, I mean, there is no bigger institution than the U.S.
[39:03.120 --> 39:03.400]  military.
[39:03.720 --> 39:05.720]  Something like three, four hundred billion dollars a year.
[39:05.880 --> 39:15.760]  And they are forced to contend with what one West Virginian soldier was, you know, they were forced to contend that they were trying to dump this scandal on the backs of these poor soldiers.
[39:16.040 --> 39:17.940]  And that really is because of the Internet.
[39:18.240 --> 39:20.900]  Because of the open and free progressive structure.
[39:20.900 --> 39:23.880]  I want to make sure to take some of the questions from the way back.
[39:24.100 --> 39:24.240]  Let's see.
[39:24.340 --> 39:25.560]  What's the farthest person in the back?
[39:25.680 --> 39:27.880]  I guess that's the, that's you right there.
[39:28.560 --> 39:28.920]  Yeah.
[39:28.920 --> 39:29.260]  Okay.
[39:29.700 --> 39:30.080]  Alright.
[39:30.660 --> 39:38.440]  Is there a concern that as the big blogs get bigger and bigger, that the donations that they get are going to have to be advertised?
[39:38.960 --> 39:45.260]  In effect, even though they have good interest in the beginning, they need to come aholding to the advertisers and whatever.
[39:45.940 --> 39:46.840]  In the end, the market.
[39:47.120 --> 39:51.820]  Well, so the basic question is, I mean, if I, he's talking about it.
[39:51.960 --> 40:05.000]  As the big blogs get bigger and have larger audiences and accept more and more advertising, aren't they gonna, I mean, I'm paraphrasing here and hopefully it's acceptable, that aren't they basically gonna turn into traditional media sources?
[40:05.280 --> 40:10.940]  Or have the same problems of being beholden to their advertisers that we see in the traditional media?
[40:11.180 --> 40:14.980]  The, the, the nice thing about it is that, you know, bandwidth is cheap.
[40:15.540 --> 40:23.660]  You know, and these guys can really be, stay self-sustained from their advertisements and they don't, they don't feel like they have to, you know, represent.
[40:23.660 --> 40:29.180]  The people who are advertising there anyway also have common, common views because they want their views to get out there.
[40:29.280 --> 40:38.120]  You know, we're, most of the people advertising on the major blogs right now are all campaigns of liberal Democrats who are trying to get, you know, progressive values out there.
[40:38.120 --> 40:42.520]  So, they're, the people who can advertise on there are all on the same page as us.
[40:42.600 --> 40:46.340]  So, it's not really an issue of, you know, will they be beholden to them?
[40:46.460 --> 40:49.520]  Because they, you know, at their, at their whim, they can turn off.
[40:49.840 --> 40:54.140]  I know, uh, Atrios turned off advertising to politicians after, for a little while.
[40:54.680 --> 41:02.640]  After, um, after the Kerry campaign took Daily Kos's link off of their site for a little while because of something offensive that Kos said.
[41:03.180 --> 41:07.820]  Which is that he didn't, he basically, I think what he said, f*ck them to the mercenaries that were getting killed.
[41:08.040 --> 41:08.240]  Yeah.
[41:08.780 --> 41:09.320]  He, he lost...
[41:09.320 --> 41:10.000]  He doesn't like mercenaries.
[41:10.200 --> 41:13.960]  He lost his temper on that, on when those four guys were hung over the bridge.
[41:14.140 --> 41:18.520]  And, you know, the Kerry campaign all of a sudden was being held responsible for what Kos had said.
[41:19.320 --> 41:24.400]  And Atrios was so enraged by the stupidity of all of it that he, you know, he just pulled his advertisers.
[41:24.680 --> 41:28.260]  But, I mean, these guys make plenty of money to self-sustain all these things.
[41:28.260 --> 41:32.240]  So it's never really an issue because the Internet is always going to be, you know, cheap bandwidth.
[41:32.420 --> 41:33.440]  So they, they never have that problem.
[41:33.520 --> 41:37.000]  Well, I mean, I, I'll take the, I, I would take a more cynical long-term view.
[41:37.220 --> 41:46.360]  Just like, you know, history tells us that basically any medium gets, unless you fight really hard, gets into institutionalized and sclerotic.
[41:46.880 --> 41:47.820]  Um, but Will has...
[41:47.820 --> 41:48.880]  It's not just about money.
[41:49.000 --> 41:49.760]  It's about access.
[41:49.980 --> 41:54.360]  And I think it's gonna be really interesting to see the 30 or so bloggers who are at the DNC and the RNC.
[41:54.680 --> 41:57.360]  Like, are they gonna be any more critical than the mainstream press?
[41:57.360 --> 42:00.800]  Because they're like, wow, we got this great press pass.
[42:01.000 --> 42:04.380]  And if we, like, criticize Kerry, maybe that'll be taken away from us.
[42:04.640 --> 42:08.780]  So, I think we should really watch what happens over the next few months.
[42:09.020 --> 42:12.180]  Because, um, that's what kind of controls a lot of the media.
[42:12.360 --> 42:14.160]  It's just like getting access to these sources.
[42:14.580 --> 42:21.560]  And if that access is taken away because they say something bad or critical, um, that's just as much as being censored by their money interests.
[42:21.720 --> 42:23.060]  Of course, one of the great things...
[42:23.060 --> 42:24.360]  Let me, sorry, let me ask you a question.
[42:24.360 --> 42:25.240]  How many of you read...
[42:25.240 --> 42:26.240]  How many...
[42:26.240 --> 42:28.040]  You guys read political blogs, or a lot of you do.
[42:28.240 --> 42:31.280]  How many of you who read political blogs read multiple political blogs?
[42:32.240 --> 42:33.680]  How many only read one?
[42:35.060 --> 42:37.840]  Okay, so the majority of you read multiple political blogs.
[42:37.940 --> 42:38.660]  I think that's your answer.
[42:39.020 --> 42:40.460]  Yes, some blogs are gonna be corrupted.
[42:40.820 --> 42:44.480]  But you're gonna read multiple ones, multiple points of view on the same issue.
[42:44.480 --> 42:46.140]  And you'll be able to figure out the truth.
[42:50.100 --> 42:50.500]  Right.
[42:50.660 --> 43:01.860]  But the whole point is that there are literally like five television networks and there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of weblogs.
[43:02.320 --> 43:05.320]  And I mean, at least right now, that's a significant difference.
[43:11.880 --> 43:15.000]  Do we have a mic for the audience?
[43:18.090 --> 43:18.630]  All right.
[43:18.830 --> 43:23.250]  Because if you're going to talk for a long time, I'll let other people hear you.
[43:25.730 --> 43:27.930]  We've established that... Is it on?
[43:28.850 --> 43:29.410]  Is it?
[43:29.690 --> 43:30.070]  Okay.
[43:31.130 --> 43:35.050]  We've got publishing on the cheap versus broadcast, right, is what we're talking about essentially here.
[43:35.570 --> 43:43.050]  One of the things that I actually would like Adam to speak to is that Dean got a lot of his momentum in the campaign, not through the blog, but through the meetups that people set up.
[43:43.370 --> 43:48.990]  And that to me is more of just a cheap way for people to communicate and touch base and link up.
[43:49.490 --> 43:49.790]  Okay.
[43:49.890 --> 43:52.370]  So it's really not... It doesn't really matter if it's a blog or not.
[43:52.510 --> 43:55.050]  It's just that, okay, we've got the Internet and we can communicate on the cheap.
[43:55.150 --> 43:57.310]  We get feedback from the public and these are all good things.
[43:57.750 --> 44:00.730]  This is why we draw these analogies back to pamphleteering, okay?
[44:01.690 --> 44:05.830]  So my question to you guys is really, how do we cut the signal-to-noise ratio?
[44:06.170 --> 44:08.390]  I mean, if you take a look at, let's say, Slashdot.
[44:08.870 --> 44:10.550]  Slashdot has like a moderation system.
[44:11.070 --> 44:15.910]  And a lot of times, you will get 500 responses to any given post.
[44:16.110 --> 44:17.150]  And most of them are crap.
[44:17.790 --> 44:21.210]  Now, in a lot of these blogs, you have comments on the same scale.
[44:21.370 --> 44:26.610]  I mean, Kevin Drum can post something and he'll get 80, 90, 100 comments on it, and most of them are crap.
[44:27.030 --> 44:38.050]  Okay, so my question for you guys is, in the grand scheme of things, as blogs become more popular and more important to this growing communication medium, how do we cut the signal-to-noise ratio?
[44:38.370 --> 44:42.050]  And where do we go from just having web pages that people dial into?
[44:42.230 --> 44:45.190]  I mean, are you guys familiar with RSS feeds, stuff like that?
[44:45.390 --> 44:46.890]  I mean, where are we going with this?
[44:46.890 --> 44:56.050]  The way we're actually building a new system, Daily Coast has a really great way of doing it, where people can vote on whether a post is worthy of being up there or not.
[44:56.150 --> 45:00.250]  And the ones that get really bad votes and troll votes, they get dumped to the bottom, or they disappear entirely.
[45:00.870 --> 45:17.090]  We're developing a system with Civic Space Labs, which is up there, using RSS feeds and websites, web content management systems, to create active sites all over the country, smaller sites, for people to organize themselves offline, you know, to work together.
[45:17.370 --> 45:30.870]  And each of those individual sites will all connect through a main syndication system, so that anybody can find out anywhere they want to volunteer, anywhere in the country, you know, for a variety of different causes, and get their voices heard.
[45:30.870 --> 45:36.250]  And, you know, the organizations will be able to find the volunteers they need, and the volunteers will be able to find the organizations they need.
[45:36.430 --> 45:41.350]  And it'll all pass through using RSS systems to make that happen.
[45:41.370 --> 45:51.770]  And getting through the, you know, the problems we have right now with commenting, there's a lot of blogs right now actually talking about commenting, and a lot of them are actually shutting off their comments, because they're getting so tired of all the,
[45:51.870 --> 45:59.570]  you know, the negative energy and the angry Republicans ranting about how, you know, Edwards has bad hair, And they are tired of all that stuff.
[45:59.890 --> 46:00.930]  So they have been turning it off.
[46:01.170 --> 46:16.650]  But these new systems that we are developing, there is Scoop, there is all these different comment moderation systems that can weed out the bad stuff, and make it such an interactive system that people definitely have a voice, and are able to communicate with each other.
[46:16.670 --> 46:20.610]  Can you talk real quickly about the back end of the CivicSpace?
[46:20.770 --> 46:21.630]  Is it based on Drupal?
[46:21.710 --> 46:26.130]  CivicSpace is based on Drupal, which was created by, I believe, three German guys.
[46:26.130 --> 46:28.430]  Like, four years ago.
[46:28.670 --> 46:29.170]  It's PHP?
[46:29.530 --> 46:30.370]  Yeah, it's all PHP.
[46:31.310 --> 46:33.790]  And it's open source, and everybody is building it together.
[46:34.330 --> 46:49.010]  CivicSpace is a political branding of Drupal that has voter filing, all kinds of ways to participate politically to help communities and organizations develop their own political systems within their place on the web.
[46:49.690 --> 46:51.150]  Actually, that's kind of a good segue.
[46:51.310 --> 46:55.950]  Can you talk... Will, could you just talk a little bit about what's going on with counter convention and stuff?
[46:55.950 --> 46:59.990]  I have actually a very specific anecdote about the dark side of open content.
[47:00.590 --> 47:03.750]  On counter convention, we developed our own open source system called Lightning Bug.
[47:04.230 --> 47:14.090]  It's a PHP based back end system where every single comment or anything posted to the site goes through this email vetting process where everything has to be reviewed by human eyes before it's posted publicly.
[47:14.610 --> 47:20.930]  And the reason why we had to do that was because we had a little open system before where people could post and there was like after the fact moderation.
[47:21.850 --> 47:29.870]  And some Republican person or somebody posted on our site that they were going to bring guns and attack the convention during the RNC protests.
[47:30.250 --> 47:36.590]  And about a week after that, we got a call from the Secret Service on my cell phone, which I thought was a joke at first.
[47:36.950 --> 47:40.590]  I was like, this is, you know, Edwin Washington of the Secret Service.
[47:40.590 --> 47:41.430]  This is William and Tundeen.
[47:41.590 --> 47:43.210]  I'm like, who the f*ck is this?
[47:43.290 --> 47:43.770]  Are you kidding me?
[47:44.490 --> 47:46.150]  And I got his number, called them back.
[47:46.310 --> 47:47.910]  It was the real Secret Service.
[47:48.670 --> 47:49.710]  Whoever posted the comment...
[47:50.450 --> 47:54.510]  We don't know for sure what happened, but we assume, because the comment was taken off about two hours later.
[47:55.150 --> 48:01.970]  Whoever posted the comment contacted the GOP News Service and the Secret Service, said this site has threats against the president on it.
[48:02.210 --> 48:03.390]  You guys need to look into it.
[48:03.470 --> 48:04.210]  And they did.
[48:05.050 --> 48:06.630]  So that's... it's a real danger.
[48:06.750 --> 48:09.770]  And the Republicans are getting as savvy as we are in using this technology.
[48:09.910 --> 48:12.630]  And they can... a real open content system can be used against us.
[48:12.770 --> 48:19.850]  Not just in talking about Edward's bad hair, but in making real threats that can get your service confiscated in a second, so...
[48:19.850 --> 48:35.030]  Yeah, it's kind of funny because in the political sphere, I mean, all the talks that we, you know, like when corporations attack, I mean, and at talk after talk here, you learn about all the different ways, all the different laws that people will shut down information flow,
[48:35.350 --> 48:38.830]  you know, all the intellectual property things, trade secrets, copyright.
[48:39.990 --> 48:53.490]  When you get political speech, you get the added one of that, you know, if you make anything that can be construed as a threat against the president or something, then you can, you know, be whisked away and shut down.
[48:53.630 --> 49:03.660]  So it's yet another... you know, so you could probably figure out some way to set up like a political web blog, which you could be shut down simultaneously in about ten different ways.
[49:03.980 --> 49:11.960]  I'm gonna have to take like one more question and then we're gonna... the next panel is gonna be more about what people are doing at the RNC, so you guys should stick around.
[49:12.520 --> 49:13.520]  The guy in the red there.
[49:18.120 --> 49:28.840]  The whole deal with Sherman Austin, like, have you tried to take like any action or like any sort of defense to prevent that from happening to you?
[49:30.260 --> 49:34.180]  Someone posted a link on his forum to...
[49:34.960 --> 49:37.680]  It was sort of a blog, but it...
[49:37.680 --> 49:40.340]  People could just post things that had an open newswire.
[49:40.480 --> 49:43.320]  Someone posted a link to another website on that other website.
[49:43.480 --> 49:49.040]  Those bomb making instructions, he got raided by like a SWAT team and now he's doing it like a year in prison.
[49:49.260 --> 49:51.480]  They were gonna charge him 20 years under the PATRIOT Act.
[49:52.100 --> 49:53.780]  He's in federal prison right now.
[49:54.760 --> 49:58.300]  Have you sort of like considered how you would deal with something like that happening?
[49:59.540 --> 50:01.100]  Consulting with a lawyer, like...
[50:02.160 --> 50:03.580]  What sort of things do you have...
[50:03.580 --> 50:05.360]  Do you have anything in place to deal with?
[50:06.320 --> 50:08.960]  Like an attack of that nature?
[50:09.480 --> 50:14.780]  I mean, one of the ironies is one of the best ways to defend yourself against that is having a very large audience, but...
[50:14.780 --> 50:15.740]  Or having a very good lawyer.
[50:16.160 --> 50:18.720]  Yeah, that happened, I think it was in Austin or L.A.
[50:19.880 --> 50:21.800]  And there's a link to the anarchist cookbook.
[50:22.800 --> 50:25.080]  And it wasn't even on his site, it was a link to another site.
[50:25.140 --> 50:25.940]  And he's currently in prison.
[50:26.040 --> 50:28.500]  And we've been working with people supporting him legally.
[50:28.740 --> 50:30.880]  But when we had our thing with the Secret Service...
[50:30.880 --> 50:33.560]  Like first of all, do not talk to the authorities yourself ever.
[50:34.560 --> 50:37.980]  Always get a lawyer because you don't know the law as well as a lawyer does.
[50:38.100 --> 50:42.320]  So we immediately contacted NYCLU who handled all the communication with the Secret Service.
[50:43.660 --> 50:45.280]  Which can do a lot for you.
[50:45.340 --> 50:47.680]  And if you kind of show like any kind of gusto with that, it's really important.
[50:47.680 --> 50:59.200]  But again, if you have an open content system and someone posts something, the way the law stands now with the PATRIOT Act and with other various local laws, you can be held accountable for it.
[50:59.320 --> 51:01.980]  And it's a real dangerous thing.
[51:02.120 --> 51:10.260]  And a lot of the judges out there don't really understand the difference between your website linking to another site or stuff that you're advocating for.
[51:10.620 --> 51:15.340]  So it's just an open content system just always has that danger if there's no moderation.
[51:15.340 --> 51:18.100]  But on the other hand, they can't arrest all of us.
[51:18.480 --> 51:20.700]  And I think that's where we're going to close this.
[51:20.940 --> 51:20.960]  Can they try?
[51:21.060 --> 51:22.240]  Yes, but they can try.
[51:23.060 --> 51:23.680]  That's right.
[51:23.880 --> 51:26.240]  There's a large prison industrial complex in this country.
[51:26.740 --> 51:30.380]  So I'm going to have to thank everybody on behalf of the panel.
[51:30.660 --> 51:32.580]  And now our hour's up.
[51:32.740 --> 51:33.580]  So thanks a lot.
[51:56.910 --> 51:57.970]  Have a little stack.