Doc is right, technology is a force multiplier, not a replacement. If there is no force then the benefit is zero.
Good points, and I like the AND logic: you gotta do more...
This, by the way, is one of the reasons why Andrew Orlowski continues to score when he slams bloggers. We've got an insular-looking insider lack-of-involvement thing going on that exaggerates the naturally large words/actions ratio which is heir to our species.
So hey: Are blogs ways of doing or just talking? Sometimes they can be both. As can politics. There's a natural affinity. Mark Twain said a politician is somebody who works for "the universal brotherhood of man"— with his mouth.
I remember something somebody once told me about Bill Clinton's biggest, worst-kept and most important political "secret": He shook more hands than any other human being in human history. Considering the man's legendary shortcomings, that says a lot.
Let's face it: Blogs today are still unnecessary and insufficient for electing a damn soul. At best they'll become necessary but still insufficient.
Winning in elections, like winning in markets, requires something more than conversation, more than buzz. It requires involvement. Relationship. Connecting and reconnecting. Performing, and not just in the box office sense of that word.
Sitting here in a hotel overlooking the city most emblematic of a nascent democracy, I find myself wanting blogs work as levers on action. And, by 2004, levers in polling booths.
As usual, the warbloggers, now morphing into polibloggers, have an edge. They have, as Dave says about the Mets, a philosophy. So does the Left. We just don't see much of it — so little of it, in fact, that there's more said about liberals by conservatives than by liberals. Go refigure.
Maybe we'll start to see a real Liberal Philoslphy emerge from somewhere other than the usual caucuses and consultants. Blogs will help. They'll fertilize the grass roots. But to succeed, we'll need a higher action/word ratio.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
