Thursday, January 08, 2004

Elros: "Dear Bowles Campaign, When you are looking to hire someone to work on your blog, I am still available. But if you are just going to do it because it is trendy and don't plan on making the internet a focus of your organization, it may not be worth your time." I think Bowles is serious -- more on that in Sunday's column. Is he serious enough to spend $100,000 to hire an online organizing coordinator and a fulltime blogmaster? I dunno. But he should be. Elros also links to coverage of the Burr/Bowles fundraising race -- Burr had a big headstart, but Bowles has a lot of momentum. 12:30:25 PM    comment []

Supporters of John Edwards can now create personalized web pages with a simple application available at his campaign weblog. Volunteers can each set up two pages, one for recruiting and one for fundraising. Editing looks simple enough to me, and I'm a low enough baseline to allow a whole lot of people to play. Here's a very early example (the pages were announced yesterday) from an Edwards supporter with a cool pic of the protocandidate. The Edwards also site lets volunteers write letters to Iowa voters and sign up for road trips to support the campaign. As with Meetup, these tools are as valuable as the volunteer energy invested in them, but so far, Edwards is stuck at fewer than 3,000 Meetup volunteers. South Carolina seems likely to either end or rejuvenate the Edwards campaign. With that in mind, his team needs to focus on the Internet as an organizing technology. The job is to get people with computers to energize people without computers to get out and vote on Feb. 3. This is not a technology job, it's basic grassroots campaigning made simple and cheap and easily coordinated by technology. In a state Edwards needs to win, it could make a big difference. 12:11:56 PM    comment []

Scott Rosenberg on the "controversy" over the MoveOn "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest: "MoveOn organizers say they will vet more carefully in the future. An alternative they should consider: Vet less. Open the mike even more. Make yourself less of a publisher, and thus less open to spurious attack." 11:24:30 AM    comment []

Digital Democracy Teach-In is the new name for the O'Reilly event on Feb. 9 in San Diego. Groovy moniker, no? Very hands-on and how-to. I'll be there. 9:08:56 AM    comment []

Halley is a connoisseur of sleep, with her own taxonomy of slumber styles and dream gestation: "...that great morning baby-in-her-crib super cosy sleep...It's the ideal sleep for big crazy silly sexy dreams for instance, so it's rather inviting." I'm a more utilitarian sleeper, but I share a bed with another connoisseur. When I started to tell Lisa about Halley's post, she said, "Does she ever sleep so long that she starts to dream in color?" I said that the morning dream Halley describes is in fact vividly chromatic. Lisa said, "Give me her URL." 8:49:55 AM    comment []

Andrew Sullivan: "(T)he key message of Dean is not really about policy. It's about liberating the Democratic Party's id." Yes, indeed, but I think the method of his campaign is as important as the message. This morning NPR ran a good story on Dean's volunteer army in Iowa -- also the subject of my upcoming Sunday newspaper column. And news about Clark's surge in the polls is a reminder that the general also has a very serious and very accomplished online campaign -- it's not a coincidence that he and Dean are running so strong. 8:32:12 AM    comment []