Category: Uncategorized

I’m headed back up to Dean Headquarters in Burlington on Monday to push a couple of initiatives along. Typical of an Internet start-up, these projects grew out of an impression, through a vision and into an imperative. The broadest vision is the one about a Billion Dollar War Chest, because it forces the special interests out of the Presidential Influence game. It’s my Steal this Campaign . . . er, campaign.

Billion-with-a-B

A while ago, Jim Moore speculated that there must be a million people in the country willing to give $1,000 to the Dean campaign. As he says, that’s only half the members of MoveOn. So my first priority next week is to push that meme along with my giving club idea: Club 42, Club 83 and Club 166. Those are the monthly contributions one gives to total $500, $1,000 or $2,000 annually. Fortunately, the club levels equate to latté units: you can make those goals by forgoing half or one or two lattés per day. Seems a simple enough metric.

So I’ll work with Bobby Clark to instantiate those club levels on the monthly sustainers page instead of the slightly different $50, $75 or $150 monthly levels. Those donors earn the same bragging rights as some self-important guy who whips out his Mont Blanc and writes a big check to the campaign. Actually, they’re worth more since they don’t demand the kind of coddling that self-important guys demand. Maybe there ought to be a special certificate for people who give so much and demand so little. (I’d suggest it to the campaign staff, but they’d just encourage me to customize a Word template….;-)

Easy Monthly Payments

In a normal campaign, this adjustment would require a round of meetings, jaw-stroking and deliberations. Not in the Dean HQ permission-free zone. Bobby and I worked this out in about 20 minutes last month, but he was in a big server upgrade and it was the final push of the September to Remember. It never occurred to anyone to circulate a memo, though he did ask me to do a little HTML mockup, like the one above.

The point is that the Dean campaign is open to having a regular guy show up with a laptop and WiFi card and having him be an equal peer. The best place to work in America today is on a folding chair at a folding table in the volunteer bullpen at Dean HQ in Burlington, Vermont.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined*

There’s a kind of Rich Dad, Poor Dad bias against presidential investing. Some people protect their interests with political contributions but it just doesn’t occur to most of us. The virtue of Presidential Investing is another Moore-ism, from when Jim suggested that the amounts that elect a president are chump change compared to the benefit: the Republicans propose to spend $170 million this year to retain control of a federal budget of $1.7 trillion per year! The wealthy got much more than $2,000 in tax refunds and zillions in corporate welfare, so it’s easy enough for 85,000 rich guys to each reinvest the maximum $2,000 contribution to help re-elect their sock-puppet. Actually, it’s probably more like 40,000 families giving as individuals.

That’s an interesting metric. In 411 BCE, Alcibiades briefly imposed the rule of the 400 on 370,000 Greeks. If the 280 million of us are being managed by 40,000 wealthy families, our aristocracy is narrower than theirs by a ratio of 70:1. The 400 held sway only briefly because the Athenian fleet rebelled at this violation of their democratic sensibilities. Perhaps its our turn.

I’m imagining a civil reformation. A few things have changed since 1776. Suppose one of them is that just voting is no longer enough. Suppose each of us gets it that to make a difference we need to vote with our wallet as we do with every other preference we hold in this insanely materialistic society. If we can get just that message across, then we’ll take our country back.

It doesn’t matter if you support Al Sharpton or Genghis Khan, there are two steps each of us can take to carve the special interests out of the political process: give an amount that’s personally significant and advertise our preference on the personal peer-to-peer newsletter we send every day–email messages. I imagine a tipping point where, just as it’s somehow uncivil to not offer an email inbox, it’s unimaginable to not advertise the fact that you support a candidate, any candidate. Anything else should be unthinkable.

Now that’s Campaign Reform!

Takin’ it to the Streets

Rank-and-file Democrats are especially unaccustomed to spending money on their candidates, which is why the DNC is accustomed to raising money in big chunks, but that’s no longer allowed because of McCain-Feingold campaign reform. So the campaign has an education challenge. My proposal is to promote contribution reminders in everyone’s email signature. These signature lines must be constructed as carefully as any movement’s viral email, with a link to the Dean contribution page, and a link to instructions on how to set up your email signature, like this:

Did you ever want to be part of something meaningful, exciting, once-in-a-lifetime, potentially world-changing? If so, the Dean campaign needs tech volunteers to help Burn the Bush. This is from the Dean Blog today:

Are you willing to volunteer your time and skills to help get Dean elected?

We need tech-volunteers!

We need bug-squashers, knowledgeable administrators, graphics designers, and
software developers, testers, and technical writers to help on state sites, development and support. We have the opportunity to change politics forever, to redefine what it means to campaign. You have the ability to create the tools that will help define the future of our democracy.

If you want to participate please email me back with the following information:

• A brief description of your technical / graphical skills
• Your estimate of hours per week you can contribute
• Any comments / questions / concerns
• If you are a professional developer, it’s very important we do this within FEC requirements. You may not work on any company computers, support, or work on company time. If you are a contract developer, your help is in-kind contribution — you can contribute up to $2,000 worth of work, minus any amount you have separately contributed (the limit for any individual contribution).
• You must be a US National

A Tag-Team Match

Unless you’re a hobbyist, you can contribute fewer than 100 hours or so, even assuming that $20 per hour is a reasonable market rate. So the trick to this from a management perspective is to find a lot of people with good communications skills to coordinate their work as they move into an active role and then back out out of it.

You will never find a better man than Zack Rosen to work with. He is probably a programming genius and even though he’s just 20, his vision encompasses technology, community and democracy. I was planning another trip to Burlington this weekend, but postponed it when I found that Zack would be out of town. I plan to meet with people more senior than Zack, but connecting with him is vital to several things I’m doing.

If the headline of this post makes sense to you, go to the Link and become a part of the solution!

2:35:18 PM    

Doc‘s at DigitalID World in Denver, bored out of his gourd.

“Very arcane, this identity shit, from the abstracto-techie world of folks who professionally care about this stuff. I’m glad they’re doing it, I guess, but…
 
It’s also dull. I just heard service oriented business solutions coming from the stage.
 
Translation: It’s not about anything interesting. It’s about delivering business value.

He points us to Robert X. Cringely, who has a practical, Xpertwebby approach to Identity: Locate each of us in a web of our acquaintanceship. Here’s the heart of it, but the whole article’s worth reading: It’s called I’m With Stupid: How Having Friends Might Be the Key to Both Privacy and Identity:

What works against us is that we have a million years of societal and biological evolution based on the concept of small tribal groups, yet only a few centuries of urban life and less than two centuries of mass transit. One characteristic of tribes is that the members know each other. So when the lady at the bank recognizes you — really recognizes you — it decreases to almost zero percent the likelihood that somebody can come in the bank claiming to be you and steal all your money. This isn’t some clever security design, but an artifact of tribal life. You don’t resent the lady at the bank for knowing you. You are flattered that she does. You don’t fear that because she knows you that you are more likely to be a crime victim. Just the opposite — we feel safer because we are known.

My system is based on a registry of friends because we all participate in virtual tribes that are geographically dispersed. Every person who wants to have credit, to make a big purchase, or to board a 747 has to have a list of 10 friends — people who can vouch for their identity and know how to test it if needed. That takes us out of the realm of the mother’s maiden name, replacing it with, “What was the nickname I called you in the fourth grade?”

I am Bob, and these are my 10 friends. 

They don’t even have to be friends — just people who know you. You don’t have to tell them they are on your list and you can change your list as often as you like.

Imagine an aerial view of this network of friends. It is so large it could only be analyzed by a big honking computer, but there is a great deal to be learned from that analysis. People could disappear and be noticed, perhaps to be found. Deadbeat dads could be tracked, as could sexual predators. Epidemics would ripple across the surface of the model, perhaps leading to targeted anticipatory preventive care, saving lives. Guys who buy enough fertilizer to blow up a Federal office building would stand out.

Now before you can say the words “Big Brother,” remember that YOU choose your list of friends so they can be people from work, from school, from the tennis club, but perhaps not from your Communist cell or from your swingers club. You can keep private what you want to keep private because the big picture is what matters here.

The system would be tied together by phone, e-mail, and Internet messaging. Ultimately,, it would come to function like a much larger version of eBay’s feedback system which would result in subtle pressure toward more civil behavior — something we don’t have in any practical sense today.

Maybe this system wouldn’t work. You tell me. But I know that what we have right now isn’t working, and I am not sure it can be made to work. The only answer that makes sense to me is to hearken back to a simpler time when these crimes just didn’t’ happen. And it is only through clever application of technology that this can be done. 

But it really needs a clever name. Too bad Friendster is already taken.

I’d go with Xpertweb. The purpose of the Xpertweb protocol is to locate each of its users in a web of acquaintance. Every user is located in a formal, stable web like Cringely describes, but each is also in an ad hoc web of those with whom she buys and sells stuff. Here’s an example of what the formal web looks like, in this case with explicit connectors to, mirabile dictu!, 10 others as in Cringely’s example:

This structure is a form of a bribe, a chain letter, really, where each person has an explicit relationship with one person at each of five mentoring levels that pre-exist her adoption of the protocols. She has her own Mentor (level 1), a Senior Mentor (level 2, her Mentor’s mentor), that mentor’s mentor (level 3), etc., for 5 levels total.

When this Xpertweb user is ready, she can mentor any number of other new users. And each of them will send her 1% of whatever business they process using the rating system, just as she sends out five 1% transfers every month.

That’s the tribal part that Robert yearns for, but what about the mechanical electronic part of the process? What’s the DigID widget?

This month Roland and I further refined the Xpertweb DIY DigID architecture. It’s an approach that’s obvious, unsophisticated and totally user-controlled, enough to earn my affections. This won’t help get you on a 747, at least initially, but it will help you do business with people you don’t know and will never meet.

The Xpertweb DIY DigID Authentication Drill

Every Xpertweb user must have his own web server. The system assumes that only the owner of a web site can quickly write a new file on it, while another person watches while it’s created.

The other assumption’s a philosophy, really, but it’s important. Web sites don’t do business with people, they do business with a reputation. The DigID challenge is to associate the current session’s keystrokes with a trusted reputation. If the reputation is stored on someone’s web server, the seller needs a way to be certain that the fingers on the keyboard are attached to the person whose reputation lives on a certain web site.

Trusting the casual visitor

All Xpertweb vendors want the world to know about their skills, reputation, products and, probably, thoughts and ideas on their blogs. Those are all published as broadly as possible, with skills and products organized into an Xpertweb index. The blogosphere is demonstrating that we crave notice more than we fear exposure.

However, Xpertweb vendors only want to transact with others having a proven reputation since, like a waitperson, the vendor’s compensation is subject to the buyer’s rating of their work. So here’s our homegrown digital ID sequence, assuming a vendor whose unique ID happens to be SSELLER and a shopper with BBUYER as a unique ID (gross simplification in effect–unique IDs are hard but possible).

1. An Xpertweb-equipped shopper is attracted by SSELLER’s reputation and clicks on a product link.
2. The product page ask
   s the visitor to enter his unique Xpertweb URL.
3. Upon submitting the URL, SSELLER’s site visits the URL and discovers there IS an Xpertweb site present with a properly formatted me.xml file at the root level and a script that says it’s ready to play nice. Only then does SSELLER’s script learn that the visitor purports to be BBUYER.
   ( Because each task has different requirements, BBUYER’s site can selectively expose needed information from the me.xml file, like a physical address or website admin info)
4. SSELLER’s script still doesn’t know if this visitor is BBUYER, so the script notes the current time, the visitor’s IP number, composes a unique ID and task file for this contact and places a cookie on the visitor’s browser, something like:
        taskid SSELLER.BBUYER.1066274480; IP 66.65.84.10 + some product info
        (a task ID = users’ IDs + the Unix epoch [# of seconds since 12/31/1969])
   SSELLER’s script knows for sure that there’s no task file with that name in BBUYER’s home/buystuff/sellers/SSELLER/ directory.
5. SSELLER’s script directs the visitor to the URL presented
6. The script at BBUYER’s site asks the still-mysterious typist to enter BBUYER’s name and password.
7. If the challenge is passed, we need a stateless way to confirm to SSELLER’s script that this is indeed BBUYER.
8. BBUYER’s script looks in its buystuff/sellers directory for a subdirectory labeled SSELLER.
         [If absent, it creates a buystuff/sellers/SSELLER directory]
         It then creates SSELLER.BBUYER.1066274480.xml in home/buystuff/sellers/SSELLER
            … listing the now-current epoch, BBUYER’s IP # and the product info
   Here’s a sample:
   <?xml version=”1.0″?>
   < xw_task>
      <phase>awaiting_buyer_specify</phase>
      <created>1066274480</created>
      <modified>1066274480</modified>
      <last_phase>phase_initial</last_phase>
      <iteration>1</iteration>
   < /xw_task>
9. BBUYER’s script returns BBUYER to the SSELLER site
10. SSELLER’s script visits BBUYER’s site and notes that the properly formatted task file was created in the proper directory at a time shortly after the task ID creation, from a browser at the known IP number.
11. SSELLER’s script looks in its sellstuff/buyers directory for a subdirectory labeled BBUYER.
          [If absent, it creates a sellstuff/buyers/BBUYER directory]
          It creates SSELLER.BBUYER.1066274480.xml in sellstuff/buyers/BBUYER
             … listing the current epoch, BBUYER’s IP # and the product info

Good Enough for Tribal Work

It may not be perfect, but it’s close enough for SSELLER and BBUYER to proceed with a transaction, whether it’s reading a blog for $.06, trying a $15 shareware, ordering a $75 Afghani carpet or paying a personally negotiated $10,000 retainer.

11:31:49 PM    

Jim Moore gives us a great sense of what’s important about people power by sharing his experience with insider politics:

I saw this problem up close and personally in the Gore campaign. I remember being at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, and having the sinking sense that the Gore campaign was moving farther and farther away from connecting with the exciting, vibrant, fresh ideas and people and groups making up the new American polis.  I was not alone. Many others at the convention had a similar sense.  But we were not able to access, much less influence, the small group of pros who had encircled Al Gore. These pros were exquisitely attuned to the traditional interest groups who make up the old Democratic demand environment. I remember voicing this concern personally at the convention to a friend who is a pillar of the party. He replied in a very nice way, “Jim, campaigns are best left to the pros.”

Well, I don’t think campaigns are best left to pros if those pros can’t understand and accept the reality of the new landscape, and can’t related to the new people, processes and issues raised by the new politics. More importantly, we need to encourage the evolution of a new political landscape in America, freed of the narrow interests that tend to define politics of both left and right. We need to use the web to bring together large groups, focused on large issues, who can counterbalance the small, well-funded and more self-centered players who currently hold the stage. I believe this is what the blogosphere is capable of helping to enable, on both left and right. This is what I personally want to work toward.

When people raise their voice in concert, it’s poetry, as Walt Whitman taught us, transcending the prosaic, petty messages of the “pros” in any field. The galvanizing effect of the Internet is just now kicking in, having completed its mandatory 10-30 year gestation described by Paul Saffo (we over-hype new tech in the short run and underestimate it over the long haul). The Internet encourages, even requires the collective, human voice of we the people to drown out the self-obsessed mechanical trivia of the pros, whether they’re navel-gazing on Madison or Pennsylvania Avenue. In fact, is there any discernible difference between marketing soap, politicians or pre-emptive war? Andrew Card doesn’t think so.

Jim is writing about the remarkably visible struggles in the Clark campaign and escalates the issue to where it belongs: Closed-source campaigns can’t compete with open source movements.

The highest hope for the emerging role of the blogoshere in politics is that we can increase the concentrated power, activation and activation speed of citizen groups with broader, higher minded interests.  The web allows millions of people to come together easily and inexpensively. Web discourse on blogs enables the co-evolution of facts and arguments that results in thousands of people becoming more aware of the stakes in any given political decision, and thus more activated to try to be involved.  And the web enables swarms to come together in minutes rather than days.  Our hope is to improve the adaptability and openness of our democracy.

The Clark case is not just a story about a group of Clinton and Gore advisors who are consolidating power over a campaign.  My sense is that the professionals who have taken over are attuned to the former demand environment, but are not appreciating how much the new demand environment differs from the old.  They are attuned to traditional Democratic interest and donor groups and power brokers, but are missing out on the new, more broadly constituted groups that are swarming across the blogosphere.  The professionals running the Clark campaign do not understand the new emerging topology of Democratic politics in America.  Most profoundly, they do not understand that the leadership of our nation requires that candidates help reshape the topology of politics—and that the Dean campaign is deeply involved in that process.

Further, the Dean campaign enjoys a classic “first mover” advantage. They are offering the one thing that every campaign needs to offer, visibility into the campaign and its staff, a product that bears up under scrutiny and is more comforting with use, and a sense of community that forms a kind of gravity well attracting more participants. People sense that a campaign so open and responsive is likely to operate a similarly open and approachable White House, a kind of Jacksonian reformation, without the korn likker. They know what the pros don’t, it’s about the governance, stupid!

Where Google offers the search results you’ve always wanted, the Dean folks have built the responsiveness people never thought was possible. It’s the Google of Presidential campaigns, so it’s hard for a later entrant to get traction, and impossible unless they embrace the new algorithms.

11:38:14 AM    

I have an additional cause for optimism even beyond the euphoria some of us expressed at BloggerCon, that blogging can revolutionize the world. That’s because I see blogging as an intermediate step toward a richer metadata protocol linking blogs about me to blogs about you and describing in detail how successfully we do business. The aim is to do more business, increasing money velocity, and hence prosperity. But the secret sauce is to create a conversation about quality in our economic life.

Xpertweb equips its users to add transaction data to their private permission-free publishing (blogging) environment. If two such bloggers trade with each other, they can agree to expose their progress to their audiences in real time. At the end of the transaction, they can give each other a 1-99% grade and a written comment. Their metadata archive can then inform others as to their reliability, as rated by trusted bloggers. Just as bloggers despise broken links, so will Xpertweb bloggers disparage erosion of transactional data. However, by mirroring transaction data, the sting of lost Xpertweb metadata is salved.

Prior to BloggerCon, Doc had suggested I post an Xpertweb description, so I wrote Blogging for Business. The suggestion then was that the Xpertweb protocols provide a specialized kind of trackback that’s highly explicit about the universal data types that describe all transactions. In fact, Roland believes that it might be possible to use the trackback mechanism as a way to propagate Xpertweb data.

I describe Xpertweb as if it will be a site you can go to and which has a proprietary hold on the “system.” But that’s just a way of describing the protocols, just as we describe cyberspace as a place when it’s really just an agreement.

Agreeing to Agree

Agreement is a powerful force. Doctor Weinberger and Doc Searls have taught us that the Internet is simply an agreement embedded in our habits, software, firmware and hardware. The Xpertweb protocol is a more abstract agreement dictating how we’ll deal with each other, and to publish the outcomes of our resulting actions. Since it’s about mo’ money, it has the opportunity to be of mo’ than passing interest. Since the protocols reward the agree-ers hugely when they get new people to adopt the agreement, it has a chance to be adopted quickly and enthusiastically. Its purpose is to terraform the global economic desert as dramatically as any Star Trek visionary.

There’s a high-level intro to Xpertweb here, and a more detailed look here. And there’s a depiction of the shamelessly viral money-spreading meme here. Some people will go to any length to invent a buck.

12:31:50 PM    

One of the most interesting disconnects among the BloggerConners was whether bloggers are the vanguard of an exciting renaissance or is blogging just business as usual. This was a common theme at the conference, reverberating from the first session through the last. Heh, maybe I just go to sessions where optimism has a place at the table.

It seemed to me that the eldest attendees tended to be more optimistic and the younger less so. Chris Lydon, Jeff Jarvis, Dave, Doc (and I) see blogging as profoundly important. An exception to that observation was the ever-youthful Esther Dyson, who didn’t seem to buy the euphoria expressed in the session, on the grounds that the blogging “elites” may feel optimistic, but that would not be the effect on the rest of the world.

Such cautionary advice prompted me to observe that no one in the room had been part of the blogging elite when they started, but the effect of their blogging had a profound effect on them and their connectivity. Further, I suggested that our world is utopia, compared to the world of our great-great-grandparents; that the only thing sucky about our world is by comparison to the world we now dare imagine, so daring precisely because of how far we’ve come and the tools now available for further improvement. I then added one of my canned memes, that blogging is the coffeehouse conversations of the Age of Enlightenment, sure to impel us forward with the same positive force.

First Magic

Esther later blogged this:

The first magic of blogging, of course, is that everyone can self-publish. Everyone has a voice. The tools makes that possible. But the next magic, much harder to achieve, is that everyone wants to be listened to.

What?!? the candidates don’t read every word the earnest bloggers post? Don’t they care? Won’t he (or occasionally she, though not at Bloggercon) reply to at least one question a day? After all, he spends quality time with “regular” reporters…

In the blogosphere, there’s no shortage of airtime, but there’s still a shortage of attention.

And attention is the world’s fuel, not content. However, must a blogger be known to the BloggerConners to feel the blogging love? Blogging attracts people who want to publish their words and retains those with a continuing interest in publishing. When a few of those bloggers publish regularly about their Harper Valley PTA, they will feel as acknowledged at PTA meetings as many of us did at BloggerCon. If you have something useful to say, it will be heard and responded to and you’ll be honored in your own land, by enough to be gratifying. But, as someone reminded the Edwards supporter, you have to earn your links.

A notable exception to my unreliable perception of optimistic seniors and skeptical others was Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com, who said it well in Sunday’s Political session, something like, “If you see what happens in Meetups, you conclude that [the blogging-political connection] is underhyped.”

Are the senior bloggers more optimistic in general than the younger? If so, might it be because we’ve seen so many dramatic changes already and have had a chance to calibrate the effect of technolgy? Regardless of the reason, I’m a confirmed optimist and likely to stay that way.

You say Dystopia and I say Utopia

Many at the conference seemed to think that we are clearly not now in utopia. What’s a utopia? Ideas are dismissed as utopian if they promise grand results relying on unreasonable expectations of human nature. A dystopia seems to be the result of (often accidental) structures purported to be for society’s good but which fail because of their dependence on humans being more charitable, law-abiding or civic-minded than they are. Such structures yield a society that is miserable for most of its members, with little hope for redemption. Bedford Falls vs. Potterville.

However, our society seems to be particularly at a loss for clues, especially when the propoganda is ignored. The NeoCons have had their way with us, and their model looks like naive utopian drivel, assuming as it does that wealthy people are inclined to create jobs with their tax cuts. No, they’re inclined to make safe investments in financial instruments that only incidentally create jobs, as in Hoover’s dystopia. It’s a shame the most grasping among us keep forgetting this lesson.

Given this disconnect, it’s time to design a civil society with highly granular productivity and mutual respect. Yes, that would be the Xpertweb meme. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Visibility Tech makes a difference

I live in New York City, where cabs never run a red light. This unlikely Giuliani-era civic-mindedness is not the product of driver training nor is it solely regulatory–the $150 fine had been on the books for years. Rather, it depends on an enabling technology. Most intersections have cameras recording the passing scene, and offending hacks get their photograph and $150 ticket in the mail. Thus the large body of Cabdom’s unthinkable acts came to include running a red light, just as mobile booking vans quashed subway turnstile-hopping, as Malcolm Gladwell described in Tipping Point, which exposes the conservative myth of civil benign neglect, which is neither civil nor benign:

…tipping points give the lie to conservative policies of benign neglect. In New York City, for example, one round of cuts in, say, subway maintenance is justified with the observation that the previous round of cuts didn’t seem to have any adverse consequences. But that’s small comfort. With epidemic problems, as with ketchup, nothing comes and then the lot’ll.

I wonder why conservatives, who cannot countenance an untidy home or dandruff flake on a serge suit, so naively neglect our shared space? Even the Bushes can’t spend all their time on Jupiter Island.

Just as traffic cameras put cabbies on their best behavior, so will Xpertweb’s transaction visibility and quality ratings cause all of us to behave better toward each other. Then we’ll put some real teeth into the conversation of the marketplace, rather than relying on the NeoCon’s wooly-headed, utopian vision of a functioning society directed from closed board roo
ms and government chambers.

10:35:17 AM    

Introducing the Blogs for Politics session, Dave Winer is reading his Tips for Candidates’ Weblogs from a month ago.

My point-by-point pushback on his suggestions is here.
4:18:26 PM    

Now that has to be the most common headline in the blogosphere today.

Dave Winer just said that the Dean campaign is only a start, dismissing it as no more than a start, that eventually the voters should write the campaign blogs, not the campaign itself. That seems to me to be true already with the Dean campaign. Matt Gross, the campaign’s chief blogger, is a blogger who just showed up one day at the campaign because he felt it ought to have a blog. So, whether or not Matt is a voter or a campaign worker is questionable. When I spent a week at the campaign as a volunteer worker, I discovered that even the paid staffers (by far the minority) functioned as volunteers–they’re voters who feel so strongly that they somehow find a way to work on the campaign full time for slave wages or less. And the campaign blog is written by several of the staffers who have become celebrities themselves. NYC Deaniacs enthused about getting their autographs at the Bryant Park Rally!

I’d like to clarify a huge misunderstanding about the Dean campaign, arising from not digging deep enough to get it how the campaign blog works: The real story of the Dean campaign is not the official blog, but the comments to the blog. The abundant, passionate and uncannilycomments are the fuel for this campaign. The threads they build there are the way this community maintains its community. And, importantly, they are half a million people who have explicitly declared themselves to be a community, which explicitly proves that this is precisely what Dave says it is not.

A Natural Law for Trolls?

I just called Dave on that issue, and his response is that there’s a natural law that if you have comments turned on long enough, the trolls will flood the place and make it uninhabitable, (especially, regarding this case, if Rush Limbaugh links to it). I opined that natural laws are routinely revised and that the Dean campaign’s success with comments requires us to update that law, if there is one.

Kevin Marks just pointed out that a differentiator is whether commenters are responding to a single item, which brings out the worst in us, or whether they expect to continue interacting over time. For the Dean campaign, the vast majority of commenters are committed to another year of building a presidency and the next 8 years helping to manage that presidency.

When a troll shows up, they thank the troll for reminding them to contribute to the Dean Troll Fund, and leave it at that. In other words, each of the commenters doesn’t feel required to respond to others, treating the comments tool as their Dean-oriented blogging tool.

Jim Moore agrees that the Dean comments are inspiring and are demonstrating the unexpected effect of comments that are both voluminous and civil. This new phenomenon deserves some serious attention.
11:46:25 AM    

Civil discourse must be just that, civil.

As bloggers, we’re inclined to be civil to each other, even as we flame those without a blog (Karl Rove being my current favorite). Listening to Chris Lydon’s interview of Jim Moore, I appreciated the suggestion that BloggerCon might promote activism:

What’s your hope, your ambition for BloggerCon?

I would love it if BloggerCon could showcase how activists of various stripes can be enabled by technology to join with others to shape a wiser and more creative world.”

How will we do it?

I think we do it by listening to each others’ human voices. I think we do it by taking our best, our most precious, but also slightly transgressing kinds of ideas and pushing them forward through blogging so we advance the frankness and the openness of dialogue. I think we do it by trying to live out values of dialogue and understanding and love on the web.

How might understanding have a role for activism? It might be by tempering the Scorched Earth tradition of politics. For that to happen, there must surely be a new way of talking about politics. Now that candidates must have a blog voice, might there be an incipient mechanism for a resurgence of substance over innuendo?

Wouldn’t it be interesting if candidates’ bloggers developed a shared aesthetic and perhaps even a kind of backchannel that promoted the kind of issues-based civility that characterizes blogging rather than the attack politics that characterizes broadcast politics. It might be a metaphor for the State Department promoting constructive engagement in opposition to ChickenHawk belligerence. You know, like the unwritten rule that we NEVER WRITE IN ALL CAPS.

If candidates’ bloggers are to be their foreign ministers, the meme might get started this weekend.

Roland on the River

Meanwhile, back at our crow’s nest overlooking the East River, Roland Tanglao is setting up the Xpertweb code on my PowerBook for our BloggerCon demo at 9am Sunday at the BOF session in Pound 201. We’ll demo through the break so you can stop by at 10:30 between sessions 1&2.

Xpertweb is a protocol for maintaining mirrored transaction data on 2 web sites, where the seller and the buyer are equally equipped to conduct business. The transaction progresses through discrete stages:

1. Discover a seller
2. Identify a product and qualify the buyer (buyer’s digital ID)
3. Specify delivery options, dates, etc.
4. Negotiate the details
5. Remark on work in progress (including change orders)
6. Invoice upon completion
7. Evaluate the transaction (by both buyer and seller)

There’s nothing dramatic about the process except that it’s not dependent on a central server so the parties to a transaction can manage their market conversation without an intermediary. Both user’s sites are equipped with tools for maintaining the kinds of explicit data types common to all transactions, plus unique data types for product specification.

9:22:27 PM    

Maybe they’re just a bunch of losers in wolf clothing. The Bush family gives us no confidence they can be re-elected, a sure sign of loserness. Karl Rove may be about to be fired for the second time for leaking to Robert Novak, and fulfill Joe Wilson’s delicious vision of seeing him frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

When Rove leaked to Novak in 1992, he was fired by the late Bob Mosbacher, another Texas Republican but one who, despite his cronyism, looks statesmanlike next to Rove, who never saw a dirty trick he didn’t like.

Is it just me, or does anyone else feel this administration seems to have a death wish? Could they have designed a more disastrous three years? There’s ample evidence that they flubbed terrorist intelligence prior to 9/11. From where I sit in the cheap seats, it looks like every action since then has been to cover up that fundamental error.

It’s like another in Dubya’s series of flawed business dealings writ large. His career has been, essentially, a Ponzi scheme, where the next investor bails out the last one. The problem is that we the people have been left holding the bag, since the only investor left to bail him out is the U.N. community, and they don’t care who his daddy is.

The Republican party has an honorable tradition of representing the interests of people who care about the orderly provision of capital and business processes for the service of society. Someone recently told me that the party has been taken over by a cabal of religious fundamentalists, second-rate business people like Ken Lay, and world domination freaks and Zionists like Wolfowitz. People like that are losers by nature, doomed to spend their lives marketing themselves as powerful, astute, responsible strict fathers, since so many people respond well to the appearance of such a father figure.

Unfortunately, such a father figure is never more than a figure, for those men are so rare as to be irrelevant to the human condition. They are the male equivalent of Sophia Loren, still juicy and appealing at age however-old-she-is-now.

The reason father figures comfort us is that we imagine them through our childhood filters. No one can live up to that role, which we discover when we grow up and see that Dad was just a guy doing the best he can like everyone else. Most of us are probably doomed to seek the comfort of parents as we want to remember them rather than humans as they are. So, like a beauty with fine, limp hair, we know our life will be perfect if we can just find the secret government formula that will deliver us from a life without a Dad to take care of us. You could call it Lakoff’s Law.

Personal Axe

My resentment of George Bush is that he’s certainly a coward. He enlisted at the same USAF recruiting office in New Haven, almost exactly three years after I did. The difference is that I went along with the program while he served as many years as were interesting to him. Now that it’s attractive to the media to bury these yahoos, the public will be told all the well-known but hitherto unpublicized evidence of Dubya’s personal failings, which are well known to anybody who’s been around him (so I’m told).

Like his buddy Richard Mellon Scaife, Georgie’s a poster boy for why we need an inheritance tax. Bill Gates knows that the worst thing he can do for his kids is make them rich, so he’s giving his money to third world health. He’ll leave everyone better off, his kids and the world’s poor.

Now we’ll have a media orgy to remember. The adult Republicans will pick up the pieces from their long day’s journey into night and the country will right itself (left, actually), return to its reliable center and perceive again that there is a purpose for government and that taxes are just the dues we pay for being in the club.

11:32:36 AM