Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Blogger sells services on eBay CBS MarketWatch: "There's a price on Jeremy Wright's head. Tuesday morning, it was $1,500, as half a dozen bidders indicated their interest in the Winnipeg, Manitoba, blogger's assistance." "Wright also writes the Ensight.org Weblog, concentrating on business and technology. He founded the blog and says he has sold it to an American company for $15,000. He will continue to write it and be paid a monthly salary." (Thanks for the tip to alert reader Tim in London.) 6:00:48 PM    comment []

John Edwards on the national media coverage of the campaign: "Too much process. Too much horse race." Edwards spent some time at the News & Record this morning, reports editor John Robinson. "Edwards said that he thought the coverage was, on the whole, fair-minded, but he added that the national media didn't cover the right things." 5:00:36 PM    comment []

A local weblog aggregator is up and running at Greensboro101.com. This page will show you when a local blog adds a new post. Think of it as a dynamic table-of-contents for the online alt-media. It's the start of something big. Roch Smith Jr. has put a lot of effort into this site -- dig the merchandise at the bottom of the page. He's also offering to host new blogs, using a functional open-source product. What works, and what could work better? Tell him, or leave a comment below. 1:40:38 PM    comment []

John Edwards looked tan, rested, and ready at his Greensboro appearance, although he wouldn't say just what he was ready for. "This fight is not over," he said to applause from the crowd of perhaps 200 at the Greensboro Historical Museum. "I'm not through fighting." The event, billed as a thank-you tour as Edwards leaves the Senate, had the feel of a campaign stop. It was carefully scripted, with a young staffer urging the crowd to fill every seat of the auditorium so that it would look packed for the cameras. The show started late, which seemed off-message -- "five minutes past rude," as one woman put it, just before State Senator Kay Hagan took the mic in her red power-jacket to introduce Edwards. His speech was perfunctory -- thanks and here's what we got done in the Senate -- but he seemed relaxed and happy to be in a room full of North Carolina Democrats (I acutally walked in with Howard Coble, and told him it was nice of him to come. We talked briefly about the human cost of public service and campaigns). Edwards took a few questions, but that, too, felt less than spontaneous. He never went past the second row and called only on friendly folks like former Guilford Party Dem chair Davy Davidson and Guilford County commissioner Skip Alston, the latter asking if Edwards would run for president in 2008. Edwards said that his plans did not go beyond helping his wife Elizabeth beat cancer, and his devotion to the woman he called "the love of my life" was apparent. But it certainly looked like he was already running for his next job. Here's a suggestion, Senator: whatever you do, get online early this time, and make the web organization an organic part of your larger strategy. Good luck, best to Elizabeth, and thank you for your service. Update: more coverage 1:33:11 PM    comment []

The John Edwards farewell tour hits GSO this morning, with an 11:30 appearance at the historical museum downtown. Eric Dyer in the N&R writes Edwards' Senate career post-mortem. 8:40:50 AM    comment []

David Wharton: "The slow death of the Greco-Latin plural" Nobody talks good English no more. 8:31:32 AM    comment []

David Brooks lives in a fantasy land. He may be right that John Stott, the subject of his column this morning, is a more profound influence on evangelical thought and practice than Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson (or James Dobson or Don Wildmon et al). But in political terms, it's not some  mellifluous Englishman who is the player in this country, but the guys with the TV and radio networks, the huge mailing lists and the "I vote Christian" logos.       Bonus Brooks: "There's been a lot of twaddle written recently about the supposed opposition between faith and reason." Sounds like creation science to me. 8:15:20 AM    comment []