At a lunchtime session, we’re trying to come up with a plan for using the Internet to advance a campaign to keep afternoon schools open until 5, with additional tutoring available. It’s a case study and an exercise, but grounded in reality.

It makes clear to me once again the difference between (1) using the Internet to organize a marketing campaign and (2) trying to light a fire on the Net. In this case, the polls show people support the idea, and the group knows who they need to talk with, so they only need to organize, not light a fire. Thus, the discussion turns to marketing and taglines.

Here’s the rub. The two approaches are at odds. If you want to light a fire, say something interesting, but marketing is reassuring and thus tends to be boring.

(BTW interesting != controversial)

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[This entry is in progress. I’ll update it as the day proceeds.]

The part of the conference that most excites me is about to begin. Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon and the Open Society Institute have created a track that has pulled together bloggers from around the world. The aim is to see what we all can do to help blogging spread, particularly in parts of the world where voices most need to be heard.

Ethan says that we’re here today to talk about blogs as bridges, borrowing Hoder’s metaphor from yesterday (blogs as windows that give you insight into someone’s world, blogs as cafes where people can talk together, and blogs as bridges). There’s something big happening, Ethan says.

We each introduce ourselves, all 60 of us. We are bloggers from Iran, Iraq, India, Kenya, China, Prague, Malaysia…as well as online activists and other bridge builders. This is a wonderfully diverse session.

Ethan: Our aim is to try to figure out how to be Hoder. “Hoder is to some extent responsible for why there are 75,000 Persian bloggers online.”

Omar from Iraq talks about the importance of blogging as a way of routing around propaganda. Then he talks about how the open comments from around the world on his blog helped his nephew “If I visited America a year and a half ago, I would have felt llike a stranger. This time I feel like I’m with friends, and that is the greatest gift I can think of.”

Mohammed from Iraq says that blogging is person-to-person. “Through blogging we can spread love, more than separate by hate.” “The media just want to create hate. But I have a different story.” He says that, for example, the newspapers play up an American soldier punching an Iraqi but don’t say that people go up to American soldiers and shake their hands.

Q: Who can get access to the Net in Iraq?
A: Just about everyone.

Chalu Kim (China): Do you also blog in Persian?
A: No. But we’re going to be talking about a Arabic language blogging tool today.
Rebecca: Big issue. Today we want to talk about how bridgebloggers can help bridge the translation gap.
Jeff Jarvis: It’s important to do both. Writing in your language builds community. Translating gets the story out.

Blackfive says he’s a military blogger. He never thought of himself as an activist, but his blog grew to include raising money for homecoming, wounded soldiers, and advocating for particular bills.

Q: How do we get a sense of what it’s like to be in the military in this conflict?
Blackfive: That’s a main reason people come to the site. Obvoiusly, bloggers can’t give away “operational information.” That’s where the censorship comes in.

Jarvis: What stories do you have of blogs forming bonds?
Blackfive: Email and blogs have brought us closer together. There’s a huge inter-service rivalry. Even within the services. So it’s really important to get beyond that. There’s not a lot of interaction between Iraqi bloggers and the military, but there is between Iraqi and American civilians.

Ethan: We’re seeing a lot of bridging to Americans. Can we open up the conversation to be more international? Jeff, what’s going on in Malaysia?

Jeff Ooi: Malaysia has given itself a mandate to enter the first world. Bloggers ask if their governance model is the right one. There are two blogging spheres in Malaysia, one written in our language and the others written in English. Blogs are aggregated at Petaling Street. “Blogging is not going to work if you have to do it alone. You have to hold the hands of the newcomers.” Broadband penetration is only 1% but we’re trying to do build bridges and renew the country.

Ory: What percent read from within your country?

Omar: Many of the people who read our blog from outside of Iraq are Iraqis.

Jeff: Malay bloggers don’t get much notice because they’re not googleable. [There’s some discussion of why that’s so.]

Q: The assumption with a bridge is that there are two level grounds. But that’s not the same wth the Internet. Even if everyone has access in Iraq, I’m sure that’s stratified by gender and education. in Iran, 3-4M out of 68M have access to the Internet. So, are blogs replicating the stratification?

Ethan: One of the obstacles to blogging in W. Africa is that there’s great conversation on talk radio. But there’s room for blogging as a way of recording stories for history.

Hoder: How about posting pre-revolution diaries so people can understand what had happened in the same places and same cities. [Great idea. I’ve been re-reading 1984 and one of the scariest bits is the way history is forced down the “memory hole.”]

Omar: Both the media and blogs in Iraq are newborn. The Iraq media doesn’t know that there are blogs.

Jeff: I was threatened with jail for something I blogged, and it helped that it was covered for 4 days on the front page of a leading newspaper.

Rebecca: We’ve seen Chinese bloggers blogging in English, and translating the English responses into Chinese, but the Chinese conversation that that engendered didn’t get brought back into English.

Part II: Building a local blogosphere

Hoder:

You can only start a blogosphere in the local language. So, I wrote a simple step-by-step guide in Persian. I even included instructions on how to copy and paste using your mouse. A month later, we had 100 Persian weblogs, the number I thought we’d have in a year. [I’ve turned his narrative into a bulleted list.]

I made templates that were widely used.

At the same time, I was trying to keep my blogroll uptodate because at the beginning there has to be a place where people can find other blogs. Competition developed to see who had the most visitors. And it’s important to support the new bloggers; if you don’t promote them, link to them, introduce them, they’ll die in a few days. Also, people need tech help understanding things like trackbacks and RSS.

Then get some local celebrities to blog. Keep up with technical innovation.

Encourage developers to create local language apps.

Hoder is coming to think that blogs shouldn’t be hosted in local countries if the regimes are repressive.

He says that the social ground must be ready forit to take off; the steps in another country might not work. His hypothesis is that the value change that happened among the young in Iran made it easier. Blogging is hip in Iran. It shows how self-expressive and tolerant the new generation has become. A sense of individuality is very important if blogging is going to take off.

India-Pakistan Blog (Dialog Now): The people who write there, mainly older people, don’t have their own blogs. In some cultures, some people are more comfortable in a shared social space.

Ory says that the blogging community in Kenya is very small. She’s returning in a couple of weeks and isn’t sure she can give a successful “pitch” about why Kenyans should blog. Most are not comfortable with this form of individualistic Web presence. She’s going to encourage more group blogging, like virtual insanity. The media is pretty open in Kenya, so that doesn’t provide a spark for bloggers.

[session still in session…]

Hoder has a page where we signed in.

Some of the blogs represented here (as I’ve rather randomly captured them):

IraqtheModel.blogspot.com


http://www.hoder.com/weblog/www.petalingstreet.orgwww.usj.com.my

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Zack Exley, Kerry e-Campaign

The Left criticizes the Kerry campaign for being too top-down. But we strove to go after results that would actually move the vote or get more volunteers on the ground in an organized program that would persuade voters and get our Kerry voters. And we also strove to get more money so we could run ads. We raised $122M online. The vast majority didn’t come from discussion groups. We sent out emails, giving people reasons to give, or reasons to go volunteer. [Yeah, but IMO they should have let more air into the campaign. E.g., MeetUps are a great way to bring new voters into the campaign. This is an argument I have had with Zack more than once, and have lost every time.]

Dan Gillmor, newly self-unemployed

I’m horrified at how bad the media coverage of the campaign was.

We have used the Internet in campaigning, but we need to think about how we should use it for governance.

Interesting things are going on stemming from the notion that journalism is becoming a conversation. In the future, I hope we see much more of people throughout campaign coverage. I want to see prominent wikis in campaigns that cover every issue so we can get a deeper understanding of what candidates believe.

Sunshine Hillygus, Harvard

I’m going to play the role of curmudgeon and point to unintended consequences.

First, the Net has removed some hurdles to participation, but only for those who are politically motivated and interested. [Really? Scott Heiferman said that said 50% of meetup attendees were new to politics.] Also, the Net increases class bias in the electorate because you have to have a computer and interest.

Second, it increases polarization. People reinforce what they believe. And the anonymity lets you profess more extreme views.

Third, the Net has contributed the pressure on the mainstream media to produce faster, more scandalous, lower cost news. They are pressured to report on things that have not been verified.

Chuck DeFeo, e-campaign manager for Bush-Cheney

Our campaign was 1:1 marketing, viral marketing. [The electorate isn’t a market!] We were most interested in building community in geographic space. E.g., “Parties for the President,” modeled a lot off of what MeetUp did. These were like MeetUps in your home. And our “Walk the Vote” and “Neighbor to Neighbor” programs. When you signed up, we pinpointed undecided voters near you. In a typical campaign, you’re bused to a part of town where you don’t know anyone. Instead, you could do it on your own time, talking to your neighbors. That’s a much more powerful statement. This helps to build networks of people for future elections, including local ones.

Q: Why did the Bush campaign turn off international access to their web site?

Chuck: In the final weeks, it was more important to get our message out to the electorate.

[A ruckus occurs because Chuck won’t say why allowing international access would prevent American access. Zack says, “He doesn’t want to say it, but they were hacked.” Chuck denies it, but won’t answer why they shut off access. Dan asks if they were afraid of a denial of service attack. Chuck repeats the same canned phrase. It was bullshit.]

Chuck: We had three missions: Raise money, get out Bush’s message, and empower our constituency.

[Zack lightly refers to that last mission as “hippie.”]

Q: Has the Net helped make the mainstream media’s coverage so dreadful?

Dan: The Net worries me because the news cycle is all the time. That puts pressure on the press to report fast but not well. I think the public service side of journalism is beginning to be abandoned. I don’t know how to fix this.

[Overall, what happened here was generally true of the day. This was a panel of fascinating people made less interesting because of the panel format. Too many panels! Not enough hallway time. I think I’m just not cut out for panels. But, tomorrow, it’s all open discussion. Looking forward to it. (Jarvis on the same topic.)]

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Oh Yeon-ho, , of South Korea’s OhMyNews

The Internet started in America for military purposes, but citizen journalism started in Korea.

Ohmynews is the citizen-journal of S. Korea. He talks about how it affected the 2002 election. There are now 35,000 citizen reporters who submit 150-200 posts a day. [No, not each.] They are paid only a little bit — $20 if it’s a big story. Readers can also comment on articles. Versioning of content encourages paid subscriptions.

Why in Korea? Because there’s resentment of the media monopoly, because broadband penetration is high (75%), it’s highly networkedsocially, and the young folks are open minded, liberal and activist. It hasn’t happened in Japan because Korean youths are more activist.

OhMyNews is a child of the marriage of technology and democracy.

Stephen Ward, Oxford Internet Institute

Why aren’t there more S. Koreas?

1. Because politicians are risk averse. And change is happening outside the parties.

2. The culture of politicians — they’re ingrained a f2f culture.

3. There are party rules that make it difficult

Rebecca MacKinnon, Berkman

The biggest influence of the Net will be in emerging democracies such as S. Korea. Philippines, too, where SMS text messaging brought down the president, which it’s unlikely to do in the US.

The Net also gives voice to the powerless in controlled environments. The problem is that you can’t go from voice to action. You can’t use MeetUp because the police will find you.

OhMyNews doesn’t claim to be objective in the way the Times does. OhMyNews is lefty. For example, there was a dispute between Korea and China, and OhMyNews set up a special section titled “Chinese Hegemon.” OhMyNews counterbalances Korea’s traditionally conservative media.

Jeff Ooi, Malaysian blogger

[He talks about the difficulties faced by Malaysian bloggers. I missed it. Sorry!]

Q: Esther Dyson: What does this do to objectivity and our expectations of the media?

Oh: The mainstream media is jealous of what we have done. Citizen reporters are asked to write under their own name, with a social security number and phone number so they can check. Copyeditors do fact-checking. We ask our citizen journalists not to follow wthe style of professional journalists; write in your own style.

Rebecca: Transparency helps with the objectivity issue.

Rebecca: Cellphone may have an impact on politics in repressive countries.

Oh: I went to N. Korea and was able to connect to the Internet by making an international call through China. Maybe someday N. Korean citizens will be able to contribute to OhMyNews.

Jay Rosen: Pretty soon we’ll be able to say to journalist, “Oh, you’re not really bloggers.”

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MeetUp’s have doubled in the past three months. They’ve built MeetUp 2.0, allowing MeetUps to have official moderators.

Scott founded MeetUp after reading “Joining one group cuts your odds of dying over the next year in half” in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone.

The Net is enabling a new type of associations, different from unions, parties., etc. The new ones are local, persistent, with card-carrying members and advocates.

The Internet isn’t about changing the world. It’s about saving the world.

[As Susan Crawford says on the IRC: Yay optimism.]

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling alone, replies. We have “privatized leisure time.” Now we’ve been having the debate on the Net’s effect on communities for 15-20 years. It’s more interesting to ask how the Net can be used not to create some fictional [“fictional”???] commnity online but real face-to-face communities.

By far the evangelical Protestant movement is the best organized in the country. It’s the biggest counter-trend to the isolation I described in Bowlling Alone. MeetUp groups don’t have the intensity or commitment and social support of the “cellular church” model.

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Tod Cohen, eBay

[eBay is the main sponsor of this event.] eBay tries to live by simple values: Most people are good, etc.

In the 3rd quarter, there were 348M listings. The total goods and services traded in the 3rd Q was $3.8B. The largest category by values is automobiles, $10.7B. 54% of the business is in the US. 12M registered users in Germany. There are 56M PayPal members. 2.4B feedback comments.

The question for the panel: What can politics learn from business with regard to the Net?

Esther Dyson

[She’s on the MeetUp board and was chair of ICANN.] “You learn from mistakes, and I learned a huge amount at ICANN.”

A lot of the utopian stuff you hear on line — “We’re going to create a global village” — is implausible, to put it politely.

In business, you can get rid of the customers you don’t like. You don’t need to follow due process beyond staying within the law. Government can’t do that. That’s why government is so ponderous and slow. The Dean and Kerry campaigns failed to enlarge the market; they were talking to themselves and they weren’t listening. In politics, you want someone with convictions and courage, but who listens so s/he can explain her/his views more effectively. the Net needs to be used more as a listening tool.

Debora Spar, Harvard Business School

The bubble taught us that the Net didn’t suspend the law of gravity. You need to have a business plan that involves selling stuff. “And I suspect the same is true in politics: Yes, there are many things we can do differently, but we haven’t suspended the basic laws of human interaction.”

Conclusions for politics: Don’t forget the basics. And what are the ways of putting together communities of interest? And business and politics are different: Business is about controlling info and politics is about disseminating info.

Esther: eBay is political. It changes how people view themselves in relationship to institutions. When you see yourself empowered in one sphere, you see it in other spheres.

[The fact that we can use the same “models” to discuss politics and business should, IMO, be taken as a sign of despair and deep cynicism.]

Jonathan Zuck, Association for Competitive Technology

“I don’t care about politics.” Politics is a little bit ridiculous if it’s taken as an end unto itself. He’s a sw developer. In politics you have a three-legged stool: voters, money, and substance. In that order.

Businesses can take on a life of their own. Look at Craigslist.org. And now it’s happening in politics. But, if people see the promise not coming to fruition, they may recede back into their Barcaloungers.

Craig Newmark, Craigslist.org

[He’s introduced as “customer service representative and founder.”]

I grew up with a pocket protector. I’m going to ignore the topic of a business plan or model because we have neither. Experience and instinct are more reliable. Craig supports “nerd values.”

“What’s working for us is that we seem to be run by a moral compass. We’re trying to do what’s right for people based initially on our own values, but the community pretty much drives us. For example, when we were thinking about charging, we asked the community what we should charge for, and they said charge people who otherwise would be paying for the service. We’re not pious about this.”

This is one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever said but the Golden Rule is really what people want from businesses and politics. Nothing fancy, just being fair, trying to level the playing field, and treating every one with respect. I’ve never said this before but we try to be righteous.

I spend most of my time doing customer service. Maybe that’s the equivalent of government service. This is dull as dirt. How does this apply to politics? There’s a lot of talk about moral values. There’s something real there. People want to be treated fairly. Work hard, play fair and you’ll get ahead. But in politics, people can be scammed by the talk. A lesson we learn from customer service is to genuinely engage with people all the time.

[I’m a huge fan of Craig and what he’s built, or, more exactly, what he’s enabled to arise.]

Q: Is the Net culture value free?

Esther: It fosters openness. Reputation systems find the bad apples and lead the rest to behave better.

Craig: People are eager to behave well.

Jonathan: People are basically passive. They’ll go online and just read. [Jarvis is shaking his head a few rows ahead of me.]

Esther: Governments should generally keep their hands off. Peer-to-peer governance is better.

Q: (Ina Steiner, AuctionBytes): What can governments learn from companies like eBay?

Jonathan: The entrenched middleman is the main barrier to ecommerce. I’m not that interested in having politics learn from business, but maybe the lesson is: You entrenched middlemen? Your jobs are at risk, too. Let’s hope they get displaced from politics.

Esther: A lot of governance mechanisms will come from outside the government, so we have to build an ecosystem of things that work together. And don’t rely on the authorities for everything.

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The Berkman Center’s conference on the internet and democracy begins with a panel on “Citizenship.”

Tom Sander, Kennedy School of Gov’t

Tom is studying MeetUp.com. They sat in on 40 MeetUps in 8 communities and interviewed people. They found that MeetUp is not a young person’s phenomenon. Attendees tended to have more education than normal. There’s a high turnover rate, which is not a good way to build trust. Nevertheless, about 30% of attendees meet up with other attendees outside of MeetUp.

Kerry MeetUps attracted 10-15x the number of people who came to Bush MeetUps. [And then the Kerry campaign stopped supporting MeetUp.] The political MeetUps tended to be larger and to have a clear leader. And they spent a loss less time socializing than at other MeetUps. The Kerry campaign at its peak hade 2/3s the attendees that Dean did at his. Maybe this is because MeetUp is more useful in the early stages of a campaign. Also, the Dean campaign was better at letting ideas and blogs from the grassroots filter up into public view.

Pippa Norris, Kennedy School

She has researched the effect of e-voting from the home or office in the UK. In Britain, they’ve experimented with doing this through phone, Palms, Interent, teletext TV, etc. This should be compared with Oregon where everything was done through the mail. The British method is more convenient, can overcome social exclusion (“My kid was sick that day,” “Too hard to get my wheelchair down the stairs”), and streamline the administration of elections.

In May 03, the UK tried 59 pilot studies involving 6M people casting real ballots. The results showed that voting by mail incrased voter turnout while e-voting was at best mixed. Young people didn’t vote whether it was postal, email or mixed. The older population really liked the postal voting. Gender, age and class were significant variables.

Conclusion: All-postal ballots are afar more effective than e-voting at boosting turnout. The Internet has more effect on other aspects of the election process.

[Pretty damn interesting. Jarvis says her pdf is here.]

Hossein Derkkhshan (Hoder)

70% of Iran is under 30 years old. 5-7M Iranian citizens are on the Net. There are about 75,000 active weblogs in Persian. The result is the Internet is the most trusted medium among Iranians.

He gives metaphors for understanding what’s hapenning. First, blogs are windows. You can see into Iran and see how deeply the Iranian people have changed, how open and more tolerant they are. Second, blogs are bridges. It can even bridge parents and children. Even the VP of Iran blogs, a nd promotes blogging as the best tool for understandiing what’s going on. Women bloggers have been invited to official ceremonies as representatives of their generation. The hardliners have blogs, also. And blogs are cafes, places where discussions happen that otherwise wouldn’t be allowed to happen.

The Internet has made the hardliners in charge so angry that they’re cracking down on political websites. They’re filtering them out. They’ve developed conspiracy theories to support their agendas, e.g., the bloggers are funded and managed by the CIA.

[Hoder is explaining exactly why for so many of us, the Internet is the medium of hope.]

QA

Lolita Jackson, pres of a NY Republican activist group: Do political meetups do better in areas where the people feel a bit under siege?

Tom: I haven’t researched it.

Jarvis: What can we do to help, Hoder?

Hoder: The world could help us a lot. Localized, free technology. Education. We need to increase access. E.g., millions in Iran have access to satellite TV. It would be revolutionary if the same tech could be used to provide Net access.

Jordan Pollack (Brandeis): WRT e-voting, people have to trust that the medium has not been undermined. [A totally off-topic editorial interjection: Jordan has created a micro version of backgammon, called Nannon.]

Pippa: There are a number of factors, including trust. We need to do more research.

Zack Exley (Kerry campaign, ex-MoveOn.org): We took the links to MeetUp off the Kerry site because we were switching to our own version. When we did it corresponds with when Tom saw the dropoff. Why do you, Tom, consider MeetUp’s stickiness to be low? Compared to what?

Q: Is the Net narrowing us or broadening us?

Hoder: Few people are able to consistently read opinions that are opposed to theirs.

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I’m at the Berkman Center’s conference on the internet and democracy, and will be “covering” it. Except that I feel no obligation to report on everything that goes on. I write about what’s interesting to me and what I think might be interesting to you.

When I’m live-blogging, I attempt to give the gist of what’s being said, keeping as true to the particular words as is useful. If I’m quoting exactly, I put quotes around it. Otherwise, I’m gisting. Remarks in brackets are editorial comments.

The conference is being webcast here. Because you need a Harvard account to use the wifi, I don’t know if there will be a backchannel.

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At the John f. Kennedy Forum at the John f. Kennedy School of Government, the Berkman Center is kicking off it’s conference on the Internet and politics. A couple of dramatic statements came out at this first event…

The moderator, journalist Kathleen Matthews, begins by saying that some think the Internet is a useful tool and others think it will change everything. She introduces Joe Trippi (head Deaniac) and Michael Turk, e-campaign director for Bush/Cheney who “marshalled 7.5m e-activists”. She says they should talk in sound bites, which she unfortunately twice refers to as “blogspeak.” [Jeff Jarvis, behind me, whispers, “She obviously doesn’t read Rosen.” And I want to tell her, “Don’t confuse being interesting with speaking in sound bites.]

Q: Trippi, you say the revolution won’t be televised. What do you mean by that?

Trippi: TV is a passive medium. In 2003, the question was whether people would get past sending email to one another and go out an organize in the community. That was a huge sea-change. What this was about is Americans learning to trust strangers again. A community of trust gets built on the Net. No one would put their name address on a telephone pole saying come talk with me about politics, but that’s just what people were doing on the Internet.

Q: For a hundred years, your party would sponsor your little league team, and on election day you’d be given a little money and you’d walk around and get out the vote. Then it became big media buys on TV. In the 2004 campaign, what was new?

Turk: Viral marketing. People at house parties pass along the messages of the campaign. That’s one reason there was more interest in the campaign.

Q: And it was easier for people to contribute.

Turk: Yes, but we were more interested in getting the volunteer base communicating and spreading the message. [Politics as “message passing.” I hate it. Democracy is not marketing.]

Trippi: The Net is making a lot of the standard powers of politics more irrelevant. People weren’t taking their cues from the party leaders. The Net let the message be spread, but it was people talking with their friends and neighbors and co-workers that enabled us to grow. Meetup.com was important.

Q: You also gave people marching orders on the Dean web site…

Trippi: We asked people to talk about Dean with a friend and get them to sign up. But people responded with their own ideas and creativity. People knew they owned a portion of the campaign, if not all of it.

Q: Wasn’t the Dean campaign almost anarchy with no hierarchy?

Trippi: We started with 432 people. All insurgent campaigns have that lack of command and control.

Turk: Because we were a presidential campaign, we couldn’t do some things that a challenger could do … some of the cartoons going around on the Net wouldn’t make it onto our site. We used the Internet to organize and coordinate, e.g., download the maps of where people should go canvass.

Trippi: We put up lists of undecideds for Dean supporters to write letters to. 135,000 letters were written to them, but we only wrote 95,000, so we know that the Kerry or Clark campaigns were coming onto our site and downloading names.

Q: What happened to Dean in Iowa?

Trippi: We were well organized. But the Iowa tape in which Dean denigrated the caucuses dropped us ten points overnight in our own polling. When Dean told an Iowan to sit down so Dean could speak, we lost another 5 points. (Trippi recounts his blunder on Crossfire in which he intimated that Carter was going to endorse Dean.) The campaign made a bunch of errors that devoured our support.

Q: In this campaign $1.5B was spent on advertising. What will happen when everyone can block out ads? And will the Internet be where this advertising happens?

Turk: There will lots of advertising on the Internet. There’s something very compelling about video.

Q: How are you going to communicate with voters in 2008?

Trippi: In 2000, you couldn’t have predicted 2004. Same thing with 2008. My guess? The Dean campaign was running video on our site, 24 hours a day. At first we wondered how we’d ever feed it. It was a headache at first. But then all over the country, people started creating their own video, running a camera in a coffee shop where Howard was eating. My favorite was a student right before an event telling Dean that he was skipping exams for this. Howard turned from presidential candidate to father…We decided which ones to post, but there was an explosion of creativity.

Q: Will we just have aggregated party channels covering the conventions?

Turk: You look at RSS feeds, and news aggregators … you create your own channel.

Trippi: I think email will be supplanted by RSS feeds as the way the average citizen gets informatoin about the campaign. I think the blogosphere is here to stay. The press keeps looking at these blogs that are getting the huge traffic, but that’s not where the story is. It’s in the long tail. Think about 4.5M blogs averaging 10 readers. That’s 45M readers. There’s no way to stop that or control that.

Q: How do you see the credibility of the blogs expanding?

Turk: You’ll see more stories like Rathergate. The depths of experience represented by those blogs is just amazing. The blogger who uncovered the forgeries was more of an expert than the expert CBS had hired.

Q: What about the problem of blogs spreading misinformation and not having a self-correcting mechanism for days?

Trippi: With blogs??? The interesting thing about the blogosphere is that the average blogger gets called on it immediately. The blogosphere and the Internet are incredibly self-policing. In one sense, the Internet is only surfacing the rumors that have always spread; we just didn’t know they were spreading. The mainstream media have the responsibility of looking into these rumors, e.g., that Bush stole the Ohio election. It’s a healthy thing that the Web bubbles those sorts of rumors up.

Audience participation:

Jeff Jarvis: This national campaign stuff is really cute, but isn’t it really going to matter at the local level?

Trippi: It’s already having a huge impact at the local level. And lots of people have learned that they can use this tool to get involved in their democracy. I’m really excited about what’s going to happen.

Bill Bates: Is the Internet bringing us a deeper understading of the issues, or shallower?

Turk: It depends on the next four years. How much of 2004 was the pop cutural coverage as opposed to community involvement.

Allison: [I couldn’t fully hear her question about the media.]

Kathleen (Moderator): In newsooms, they’re checking the blogs, just as print reporters watch cable news. News is more of a conversation. News consumers are also producers.

Trippi: When reporters were embedded in Iraq so that we only got one flavor of coverage, there was only one place to go: the blogosphere.

Kathleen: It’s a shift in the power structure of the media. And politics.

Q: How do you balance the need to focus on a controlled message and the emphasis on grassroots opinions?

Trippi: If you have the answer, we want you as chair of the Democratic Party. We need to let the people’s voices speak and let the message emerge.

Q: Digital divide? Is using the Internet for politics just white guys talking to white guys?

Turk: It also brings in the activists.

Trippi: Don’t think about the Internet as the age of information but as the age of empowerment.

Jay Rosen: This year, a more interesting narrative was that some people in politics still practice control and some who believe in de-control. This was a war in the Democratic party. It was probably there in the Republican party as well. That’s one way of rewriting the story of the campaign. Looking forward, you have all these people in politics whose career is tied up in control of story, money, news, etc. If the Net is really going to de-control all that, then what happens to this class?

Turk: Every article we saw about the e-campaign was “The Bush campaign is all about control.” But there was no feeling of that internally. There are lots of people who don’t mind bowling alone, who don’t want to be part of a communal structure. [Stowe Boyd, sitting next to me, mutters, “That’s preposterous.”] We never told a volunteer that they had to make ten calls. We gave them tools so that they could spread the message of the campaign. [NO MORE MESSAGES! Please.]

Trippi: Up until this election, there was no where for the urge to reform to go. Both parties continue to slap down reform and not get that this is about recognizing that there is an urge to participate and urge to reform. One party — probably the Democrats — will go to the way of the Whigs. [Whoa, Nelly! Don’t go telling the truth!]

Q: Will the Internet strengthen the two party system?

Trippi: The parties are already becoming irrelevant. The Democratic Party beats the Republicans only in contributions above $1M. You can’t have that and withstand the pressure from below for reform. Someone is going to run an independent campaign and wreak havoc on the parties.

[Turk talks about marketing and passing messages. Trippi talks about people talking and conversing. OTOH, Bush won and Dean lost.]

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Alan Goldberg of Goulston & Storrs (and HealthLawyer) is giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk on the national health information infrastructure.

He says it’s a big deal: Medicare has 1 million providers who are involved in 1 billion claims per year. NHII crosses political boundaries; everyone from Bush to Hillary, from Ted to Newt, all support having an infrastructure that enables electronic record sharing. The NHII will require technologies, standards, systems, values, applications, and laws.

The standards are arising from the industry (says Alan), not from the government, although the government’s adoption of these standards counts for a lot.

He says NHII has four areas of concern:

First area of concern: Uniformity of privacy laws. HIPAA says that stricter state laws on privacy override the baseline federal standards. That complicates things. And you have to balance privacy against the desire to share medical information among providers. “Maybe we have to change HIPAA” says Alan.

Second area: Access & control of patient medical information. NHII can exacerbate the tension between the “duty to warn” patients of medical risks vs. the right to privacy. “Should you be entitled to access information via the NHII to find out if your spouse-to-be” has a sexually transmitted disease?

Third area: Secondary uses of medical information. Secondary users of health information may not be covered by the HIPAA privacy rules.

Fourth area: Miscellany. Is NHII conduit, custodian or architecture? Who owns the info contained in NHII? Should the data be mined for the greater good? Should the FDA regulate parts of NHII?

A couple of days ago, the head of the NHII issued a Request for Information, i.e., public comment, about communication among doctors and health institutions.

Alan says that Bush is the more committed to creating an NHII than any other president. [On the other hand, he set up the NHII without budget, employees or the mandate to propose law.]

Q: The linchpin is patient privacy. If people think the system doesn’t protect their privacy, they’ll filter the information they provide, which will result in worse medicine and more malpractice cases. In fact, AG Ashcroft in the partial birth abortion case said that HIPAA means there’s no longer a presumption of privacy. What’s missing from this infrastructure if patient consent.

[HealthLawyer.com looks useful but, jeez is it ugly and overly disclaimed.]

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