Politics online conference wrapup: (Updated: to fix some typos of blogging on a bumpy flight — nothing substationally new from the original post.) I
think it was yesterday when I was at George Washington University at a
conference about online politics, but I’ve only been in Austin 12 hours
and my mind has moved onto the future. But here are some points I wrote on
the plane…think of them as my Power Point presentation of
observations about online politicians (or, at least, the folks who work for or
study them) and, in general, conferences that have sessions related to
“understanding bloggers” where there are very few actually bloggers in
the audience (or, in some instances) on the panel.
These, of course, are merely opinions. My opinions. And, unfortunately, I had to leave before Glenn Reynolds spoke:
- Whenever you hear the word “content” used by someone on a panel, it means they don’t know what they’re talking about.
- Just because someone happened to be there when some
bigger-than-life phenomenon happened (i.e., the Dean campaign) doesn’t
mean they knew then or know now what happened. (I’ll give Joe
Trippi credit, however, he admits this.) - Some old traditional political hacks are like old journalism hacks: bloggers scare the hell out of them.
- Very, very few political experts know what an RSS newsreader is.
- The Roper people have hyped that “influencer” stuff for as long
as I can remember…and have found a way to hype it onto the
blogosphere. - There are a lot of very smart people involved in online politics
who are willing to pay a lot of money to have someone tell them what
they could learn in about a month of blogging…and, please, reading
blogs. - The debate over whether bloggers are or are not bloggers is a
circular, meaningless waste of time. I’ll quote (or paraphrase) Dave
Winer: We’re either all journalists or none of us are journalists” when
it comes to who should be be able to speak freely. Beyond that, who
cares? The consititution does not set up an accreditation process for “journalists” like
someone in the audience implied yesterday. Frankly, I don’t want to be a
journalist (on this weblog, at least). This is me talking. I’m not
reporting. I accept the responsibility not to libel or slander or do other
unlawful acts or practices that will have you question my integrity or
ethics. But, please, don’t call me a journalist for what I do here. (I
do play a journalist in another gig, however.) - By the way, from an integrity perception standpoint, many of the
bloggers I know would rather be called a used car salesman than a
journalist. - I have a theory developing: Some people who appear on panels at
online politics conferences don’t actually use the Internet but think
it’s a “great tool” for helping them communicate with and activate
those in their sphere of influence who do actually use the Internet.
I’m not naming names, however. - My
admiration for certain of my fellow bloggers who appear on lots of
panels has grown. I don’t know how they can endure appearing on a
panel called something like, “How
to cope with those crazy bloggers” and not jump over the table and slap
the
hell out of the next guy who has obviously never read a blog but is an
expert on how blogs have already reached their zenith. - The next time I moderate a panel (I didn’t at this conference) I
will only call on women questioners. As much as I’m, well,
not enlightened, I observed that moderators have a difficulty seeing
women when they raise their hands. - I agree with, once again, Joe Trippi who observed that
we’re at about the spot TV was in 1955 when it comes not only to online
politics, but, really this whole participatory, conversational,
citizens media movement. - Everyone who thinks there’s just “a bunch of chaos and noise” out
there on blogs, please, download a desktop RSS newsreader (or use My
Yahoo or Bloglines) and figure out how to set up folders and feeds.
It’s not about chaos. It’s the opposite. Because of blogs, I can learn
and distill so much more than ever before because I can draft off the
steady breeze of brilliance from those whose I can, over time, learn to
trust. - When something hasn’t yet been fully created, the worst thing to do is to start making rules and applying metaphors.
- People who don’t underestand the podcasting’s secret sauce of RSS
enclosures call something that is not podcasting, podcasting. They
apply the term to posting an audio file on a website where someone can
mannually download it, missing the “-casting” aspect of the metaphor. - Certain members of the FEC are nothing more than scare mongers
who view the blogosphere’s disdane for regulation as a cog in the spoke
of some greater agenda. Unfortunately, they are scare mongers with
power. So, despite knowing exactly how all of this is going to turn out
— i.e., I’m not worried about the feds cracking down on bloggers — I
will officially cast my support behind any efforts of bloggers who want
to crackdown on the FEC.
Great summary Rex. Your observations are dead on. Hearing people talk about blogs at this conference was a hoot! “This blog thing has only been around for a year and look how important it has become.” Oh yeah, tell Dave Winer that blogging is only 1 year old… how long has Scripting.com been up now?
And the ignorance of RSS is remarkable too. I spoke at a similar conference in SF last year, and one of my major points was how frustrating it is to have my primary electronic point of contact with my constituency be e-mail — a medium which is broken in huge and obvious ways. I pointed to RSS as an example of one way you could do the same sort of thing better. Pandemonium! Most people didn’t know what RSS was, and those that did were scared of it — because you couldn’t get things like open rate data, etc. that you can get with HTML e-mail. Absolutely nobody was thinking about what would make their members’ lives easier by freeing them from having to worry about getting buried in spam because they gave some group their e-mail address and that group re-sold it to everyone under the sun. Amazing.
I’m sure that by 2010 or so we’ll start to see panels at the Politics Online Conference that reflect the reality of the world of 2005… (sigh)
i have an argument in favor of the FEC’s position that you may find interesting at my blog, http://www.democracyguy.com
Thanks for the write-up, Rex. Reading about it is even better than sitting through those boring know-it-all panels. 😉