Friday, February 13, 2004

Technology integration projects are often disasters. What are the challenges of combining the best tools and practices of, say, the Kerry and Edwards campaigns? How can the eventual nominee (whoever that may be) and his running-mate leverage what Dean and Clark have arleady done? Maybe that's some of what Sanford Dickert, Kerry's CTO, was thinking about while in San Diego on Monday. * * * The volunteer-generated Win With Edwards tool, which helps the candidate's supporters find other local supporters, has almost 4,000 registered users. Meanwhile, the official campaign blog is getting about 2,200 comments per day -- about what Dean was getting in early October. Edwards has just over 9,000 Meetup registrations, Kerry over 45,000. 6:19:40 PM    comment []

Computerworld: "(L)ong-term IT thinking is detrimental to a political campaign." 5:36:18 PM    comment []

Take blog comments—please. Steve Gillmor on campaign communications: The CTOs of the various campaigns defend their use as a simple user interface for casual involvement by newbies. But converting the undecided into active offline participation involves more than just the harvesting of good ideas. Comments destroy the signal to noise ratio of blog brands, trading the appearance of democratic participation for muddied messaging and vulnerability to comment spamming. Instead, authenticated private RSS feeds could replace e-mail and public blogs as a collaboration engine, routing separate comment feeds via group filtering to allow good ideas to bubble up and noise to wash out of the system. Dynamic group formation and attention feedback loops such as Technorati's attention.xml service could be harnessed to manage rapid response teams, monitor media trends and squeeze more strategic business intelligence out of the information firehose. 5:30:48 PM    comment []

Did you ever wonder how Jay Rosen writes those long, smart posts at Pressthink? Well, now I know: the man has preternatural powers of concentration. He worked on this analysis of Trippi's speech in the media room at e-Tech, with David Sifry and me nattering away beside him, as the crowd gathered around the buffet table behind him, and even after the bar opened up. Update: This article is a New Yorker-caliber piece of journalism. 9:33:55 AM    comment []

Southbound: I'm driving down to EMFest, just past Charlotte in beautiful Rock Hill, SC, to give a talk: "Will Work for No Food: Confessions of a Professional Journalist with a Weblog." Lisa says its a clunky title. Tough crowd at the breakfast table, hope that's not a sign of things to come this afternoon... 9:21:46 AM    comment []

Hmm. Camilo invites me to be his Orkut buddy, but then he posts that "Orkut sucks." Let's see. I have real friends in the real world. I continue to make new ones -- through my job, through my kids, through volunteer work and everyday life....and I manage to keep up with my friends, some of whom I've known since kindergarten. And I have a weblog to connect me to virtual friends around the world, with email and phone to get more personal if we want. And I need fewer ways to waste time online, not more. So, I'm passing on the friend networks. But Camilo, my friend, drive over to G'boro and I'll buy you a drink. And you still have the best tagline for your blog, Mercurial -- "Weighty, fluid, brilliant, and toxic." 9:09:08 AM    comment []