I’m at the Howard Dean HQ in Burlington where Josh Koenig has just walked me through DeanSpace (verson 0.95), a facility that launched yesterday. It’s further evidence that this campaign isn’t using the Internet so much as it’s been shaped by the Internet.

DeanSpace is an open source tool, built on Drupal by a community of volunteers independent of the campaign itself, that lets anyone set up a site for a community of Dean supporters. The community might be topical (e.g., Pilots for Dean), demographical (Seniors for Dean), local (Albany for Dean) or just plain peculiar (Girls Gone Wild for Dean). Setting up your own site is straightforward enough for someone who’s edited config files before — techier than you’d like, but the documentation walks you through it — and now you have a site with the ability to blog, create a shared calendar (including events from the Dean Get Local registry of local events), hold a forum, invite users, register them and give them each a home page, load up a shared picture gallery, manage a mailing list, run polls, manage a group task list, and send users messages.

So far that’s pretty cool in my book. But here’s what really impressed me. If you were running a typical business, you’d think first about how you’re going to manage the groups that get set up. If you were an enlightened business, you’d let groups do what they want, but you’d figure that a big part of the appeal would be the way you could quietly gather anonymous marketing and demographic data. But if you were really webby, you’d think first about how you could get yourself out of the middle so that the system could truly empower the people using it.

Welcome to DeanSpace.

It’s designed to give these community spaces true autonomy, and it assumes that these autonomous communities will want to share their work. So, every bit of content on a DeanSpace site can be served up via RSS. If your site, Mimes for Dean, sees something interesting on the Hassidic Baton Twirlers for Dean site, you can RSS it directly on to your site. The Dean campaign is entirely out of the loop, although you can (don’t have to) register your site with a page that lists ’em. And the campaign is busy RSS’ing not just their site but their associated tools, like DeanLink (the social network for supporters).

This is exactly how grassroots campaigns can be transformed by the Internet at its best: not (just) a fund-raising machine, not a way to blast out campaign messages, but a tool for letting people form the groups they want and talk. And act.

Josh says that future releases will be wizard-based and spaces will come pre-loaded with useful defaults and Dean stuff like a banner with a photo of the Governor.

Also,at least some of the official Dean state organizations will be using DeanSpace. (Keep in mind that DeanSpace is independent of the campaign. The Federal Elections Commission cares about that.)

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Sarah Lai Stirland interviews Dan Gillmor and me about WordPirates at Corante. Amusing? You be the judge. (But please don’t tell me if you think it’s not.)

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You know who did a fantastic job putting the WordPirates site up, installing the blosxom software, doing the cgi scripting, and being an all-around pleasure to work with? Seth Gordon, that’s who. Here’s his resume. You’d be a fool not to hire him.

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LanguageHat has some good links about the gibberish-that-isn’t-gibberish that’s making the rounds of the Web, including one to Metafilter. Amazing stuff.

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Dan Gillmor and I have just launched a site called WordPirates where you can register and discuss words that you feel have been taken over by commercial and political rapscallions who twisted them to serve their own nefarious purposes.

For example, people who share copyright mp3s may be many things, but they are definitely not “pirates.” And when you stay in a hotel, you are certainly not their “guest.”

So have at it, me hearties! And spread the word.

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JD Lasica writes about the “We Media” report on participatory journalism and “How audiences are shaping the future of news and information.” It’s by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, edited by JD, with a foreword by Dan Gillmor. I’ve skimmed it and it looks like it’ll be the reference point for any serious discussions of this topic from now on.

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I just got spammed by vote.com. They’re selling some schlocky novel best described in its own self-promotional words:

…a riveting thriller about a deadly virus, born of the past that threatens to destroy the present. … seamlessly weaves genetics, terrorism and the very human struggle of right and wrong into a terrifying and unforgettable story.

Ah, self-parody! What can’t it parody?!

So, why is vote.com flogging riveting cheesy thrillers? I’m going to guess that it’s for the money. It’s sure not for building trust with the site’s subscribers since its privacy page says it won’t send mail to people who haven’t asked for it.

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Gary Turner is proposing that Universal Beverage Code for telling vending machines exactly what beverage you would like:

Eventually, an extra milky, extra sugar decaf latte will always be number 283 regardless of which make and model of vending machine …

Oh, please sign me up for the steering committee! I can’t wait to insist that all coffees made with hot milk simply have to begin with the digit 5.

But that reminds me of the only joke I know that has two punchlines:

A new prisoner is at his first lunch. A prisoner stands up and calls out “73” and everyone laughs. Another one stands up and calls out “142” and everyone laughs. The new prisoner asks his table companion what’s going on. “Oh,” says the companion, “we’ve been here so long that we’ve memorized a book of jokes, so now we save time just by calling out the number of the joke.”

So the new prisoner figures he might as well give it a try. He stands up and confidently calls out “56.” No one laughs. “What did I do wrong?” he asks his companion.

PUNCHLINE #1: “Well, you have to know how to tell a joke,” the companion says.

PUNCHLINE #2: “We’ve heard that one before,” the companion says.

Anyone know any other jokes with multiple punchlines?

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Jay Rosen‘s posted a brilliant piece on the role of the “master narrative” in political reporting. That’s a term borrowed from the Post Modernists and Rosen uses it to point out that the common themes of political reporting are social constructs, not natural. Politics gets reported as a horse race not because candidates are horses in a race but because that’s the narrative form we’ve created and accepted. As Jay says in another piece, ” Journalism schools don’t teach this, but it’s nonetheless true: Facts can’t tell you how they want to be framed.” (He should know; he’s chair of journalism studies at NYU.)

This is George Lakoff territory and it needs to be more fully explored.

There’s no escaping narratives, a mortal blow to objectivity’s dream of hegemony. Narratives area how we understand, not an obstacle to understanding. But it’s important to remember that events can be incorporated into many different narratives. (My Inner PoMo wants to blurt out that events are not atoms independent of the narratives that take them up.) And, it would be useful to cast politics into alternative master narratives.

For example, maybe the elections of 2004 could be reported not as a horse race but as a conversation. Or as a form of co-evolution. Or as the way in which a community forms its will. Or as how a nation makes up its mind. Or as the story of how many-ness becomes one.

Unfortunately, we have only a little control over which narratives master us. But it’d be worth trying…

Jay has just posted a piece on how you “cover” 133 candidates for governor that touches on some of the same issues.

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According to an article by Anne Geske in the Utne Reader (Sept-Oct):

A map showing percentages of adult movies in the home-video market by state ‘bore an eerie resemblance’ to the 2000 election, remarked Pete du Pont in a recent Wall Street Journal Web site column. A survey conducted by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States also found that the vast majority of states that voted for George W. Bush are states that are less responsive to issues of sexual rights and sexual health. Criteria used in this survey included the right to engage in sexual behavior in private, the right to express one’s sexual orientation, and the right to sexual information and health services.

Bogus Contest: Let’s come up with new slogans for the Democratic Party. For example:

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