Monday, August 16, 2004

BloggerCon III, Stanford Law School, November 6, 2004. 8:17:33 PM    comment []

Here's the archived audio file from today's roundtable on WUNC's the State of Things. Highlights: Duke poly-sci prof Mike Munger explains that Republicans tend to poll a few points lower for national races in NC than they end up doing in the election, so Bush's lead here may be more substantial than it appears, and Burr may not trail Bowles by as much as it now seems...a caller from GSO says he's a construction worker and Marine vet who won't be voting for Bush, and that some of the Republicans with whom he works feel the same way...and the econometric model featured in yesterday's NYT, which predicts a Bush landslide, is built upon a positive view of the economy that does not match real world experience...plus lots of chat on the Fightin' Fifth congressional district (Vernon Robinson v. Virginia Foxx), our shy Governor, NASCAR, etc... 6:26:22 PM    comment []

"We'll be getting piles of political letters between now and Nov. 2. ..the scurrilous diatribes will go to the wastebasket...Share your own opinions, but base them on verifiable facts." Tim White, editorial page boss at the Fayetteville Observer: "Some local letter writers are embracing the techniques of sleaze, slime and misinformation that they're seeing on the national stage, joining the army of the scurrilous. It's disheartening." (via Romenesko) 3:36:58 PM    comment []

Keep on the sunny side: Opinion Journal publishes Aussie blogger Arthur Chrenkoff's round-up of good news from Iraq. 3:13:25 PM    comment []

"The voices from the edges of the political system—average people with real-life concerns, not just the big-money crowd—had been heard... ...even as the pundit class was dismissing the Dean phenomenon and, by implication, the value of the Net, it was increasingly obvious that the political sands were shifting." That's from Dan Gillmor's book, We the Media. Chapter 5, "The Consent of the Governed." You can download it for free or buy the hardback here. Not required reading for our conference...just required reading in general. 3:07:22 PM    comment []

Katherine Lee Payne, Guilford County Register of Deeds, says she plans to attend the 8/28 blog conference. We might see the man behind Charlotte-based Anonymoses and HyperLincoln, too. 1:10:02 PM    comment []

Monkeytime introduces us to NCSU prof and writer John Kessel and his "opinionated little gem" of a book, Good News from Outer Space. Bonus link to Kessel's essay on Orson Scott Card. 8:43:49 AM    comment []

Dave Winer is getting his third BloggerCon on. This is our model in GSO. "Everyone is invited and the cost is $0...do you have the guts to come to a conference where there is no pecking order, where your ideas might actually be heard and acted on?" 8:25:01 AM    comment []

I'll be on WUNC's The State of Things at noon today as part of a journalists' roundtable on whatever red meat they plop down in front of us. 91.5 on your FM dial, or streamed here. Looks like they have Justin Catanoso on, too, doing a bit about Dell in the Triad. 8:22:10 AM    comment []

A friend emails that the name Piedmont Blog Conference makes it a tough sell beyond Greensboro...but they taught us in grade school that the Piedmont is the region between the Appalachians and the coastal plain. The Triangle and Charlotte are in the Piedmont, which makes up almost half the area of the state. Anyway, the conference is open to anyone from anywhere, it just happens to be located in GSO, part of the fabulous Piedmont Triad region... ...and another potential attendee emails to say "I'm usually not much for self-congratulatory 'blogging will save the universe' stuff. Seems to me that blogging is already well on its way to being coopted by Things As They Are." No universe saving here, bub, just an attempt to share something about writing onto the web with politicians, writers, and readers. Just because The Man tries to coopt something, we don't have to cede it to Him. Anyway, as this article about Warner Brothers Records shows, The Man don't always know what the hell He's doing. Many bloggers found Warner's campaign to be clumsy at best, and sneaky at worst. "You can't just dive headfirst into a subculture and expect it to bend over backwards to cater to your lame attempt at free advertising," said Andrew Nosnitsky, a senior at George Washington University who writes about hip-hop on his blog at www.cocaineblunts.com. Mr. Nosnitsky also mocked Warner for sending a rock track to a hip-hop site. 8:14:57 AM    comment []