Smallbrain Solutions

Lots of comments on the Blogging of the President last night. I think the most interesting comment is from David Weinberger who picks up on a theme from his must read Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and argues that the increasing “a-listing” of the biggest blogs threatens to return to a “newspaper” model. His book postulates that the nature of “authority” has been subverted by the web and now you have anonymous folks like Atrios viewed as “authorities” in their respective fields.

I find that this follows a similar line of development which continues to this day, where the a few gigantor sites command the vast majority of the traffic. On the plus side, niche sites like ours cater to previously unreached segments of the market… even if the natural tendency of blogs is to aggregate at the “higher-being” level, there is still plenty of traffic for the rest of us to work with. If we don’t suck.

That, and, we could always be annointed “authorities” if we suck even less.

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via BuzzMachine, Sunday night from 9-11pm (Eastern Time), Minnesota Public Radio will be hosting a national call-in show, hosted by Chris Lydon.

Guests include Atrios, Josh Marshall, Gary Hart and more.

Thankfully, WAMU will be carrying it… you can see the participating stations here.

Internet activists/strategists/pundits doing a radio show. How post-modern is that? Or is that post-post-modern? crap.

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Jim Moore suggests that Dean’s turnout in IA was 15,000 below their hard count of 40,000 caucusers. via CalPundit and CNN, the entrance polls suggest Dean lost seniors AND first time caucus-goers to Kerry.

I was expecting to see the seniors go away, but do the low results from first-timers suggest that Dean’s online organizing was not as successful as we thought in pulling those new voters? I hope not. Maybe the IA Caucuses are just weird… We will see about NH.

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Alex Alben (http://www.alben2004.com/alexblog.html) may be the first blog from a congressional candidate. It is probably no surprise that he is a retired Internet Exec. He doesn’t allow comments, but the writing is pretty good.

Senate Democratic Leader Daschle put one up on his campaign site during his annual ride across South Dakota and appears to be updating it now - the newest entry is here, but it was widely panned as a press release factory… and no comments, trackbacks, etc.

Thanks to Ken for the comment on my previous post on the subject. He is trying to convince his brother (a city commissioner) to start a blog for folks to get more involved with local politics. That would kick ass.

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Clay Shirky (posting at Many-2-Many) and Jon Stahl point to a post from Desigining for Civil Society regarding Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford ’s article for Democracies Online Newswire (big shoutout to fellow minnesotan and internet pioneer Steven Clift) titled Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism.

(pardon me while I catch my breath from all that trackbacking/linking)

(one more minute)

Ok. Anyway, you can read the top 10+ for yourself, but the whole time I was reading I couldn’t stop thinking about the depth of discussion that is clearly going on in the NGOsphere (newly minted term from jon stahl) and how little of that discussion is really going on in the CampaignSphere (newly minted term from me).

I suspect that will change as soon as the caucuses/primaries wind down and more local and other federal races get going. I wonder if their should be an online non-partisan conference this summer? As if any of us political ‘net developers have time…

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