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Thursday, September 4, 2003
No short 
| | Thanks to Britt, I just found Selling Dean Short, by Katha Pollitt in The Nation. It squarely nails what's still, 3/4 of a month later, rather pissy coverage of Howard Dean by the mainstream press. |
| | What did Howard Dean do to make the media so snarky about his primary run? Now that he has emerged as a major fundraiser with flocks of enthusiastic supporters, a vigorous campaign staff, a bag full of Internet tricks and respectable--and rising--poll numbers, the pundits and reporters have to go through the motions of taking him seriously. |
| | ...aside from some curiously cheerful coverage in the Wall Street Journal , they obviously don't like him. He's "brusque," "testy," the "ex-Governor of a speck of a state" and "a shrill Northeasterner," Karen Tumulty wrote in Time . "It's hard to imagine Dean's glorious season ending without disappointment," adds John Cloud in his profile in the same issue, in which he draws a labored and precious similarity between Dean and George W. Bush (both come from rich Republican families, both went to Yale, partied hearty, speak Spanish--never mind that Dean went to medical school while George II relied on his father's cronies to set him up in the oil business). "The Doctor Is In--In Your Face!" warns U.S. News . Over at Newsweek ("Destiny or Disaster?"), Jonathan Alter also finds "the diminutive family doctor" "brusque" and says he "strutted like a little Napoleon onto the floor of the usually genteel Vermont State Senate." |
| | A little Napoleon? Is that the problem--Dean is short? (He's 5' 8".) In order to run for President one must not only be white, a man, married, religious and Southern--not to mention whatever the opposite of brusque may be--one must be tall as well? No wonder I love this man! Every time the press pooh-poohs his chances, every time they gloat over some trivial misstatement, every time they make fun of Vermont and describe his supporters as "Birkenstocked" "Deanyboppers," I think about the free ride the media give Bush, who says more false and foolish things in an afternoon than Dean has said in a lifetime, who is unmaking everything good about this country from Head Start to habeas corpus, who is stacking the government with faith healers and fanatics, my fingers itch to write Dean another check... |
| | I've talked to quite a few Dean supporters, including mainstream Democrats, lapsed voters, flaming leftists, Naderites, gay activists, civil libertarians, anti-death penalty lawyers, pro-single payer health professionals and even a surprising number of Nation staffers. I have yet to find one who mistakes Dean for Eugene Debs, or even for Paul Wellstone, whose line about belonging to the "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" Dean likes to borrow. They've gone for Dean because, alone among the major Democratic contenders, he has taken Bush on in an aggressive and forthright way, because he's calling the craven Democratic Party to account and because they think he can win... |
| | Right now, Dean is the only viable candidate who speaks to the anger, fear and loathing a large number of ordinary citizens feel about the direction Bush has taken the country, while the mainstream media blandly kowtow and the Democratic Party twiddles its thumbs. He has gone out and actually asked for the help of these citizens, rather than taking them for granted. That is why 70,000 people have sent him money, and why 84,000 have shown up to work for him, and why tens of thousands of volunteers wrote personal letters to Iowa and New Hampshire Democrats and independents urging them to support Dean. His willingness to challenge Bush without looking over his shoulder at the last undecided voter in Ohio is the big story--not whether he signed Vermont's civil union legislation in a private ceremony to avoid publicity, or even whether he insisted on balancing Vermont's budget at the expense of worthy social programs. |
| | What the media see as progressive self-delusion is actually the opposite: a bare-knuckled pragmatism born from the debacle of the 2000 elections. If Kucinich can capture the public's imagination, great. If Kerry acquires more backbone and fire, fine. Right now, though, it looks like Howard Dean is Ralph Nader's gift to the Democratic Party. |
| | Now nobody is calling Dean anything other than a frontrunner, even if Wesley Clark is waiting in the wings (ready to run for V.P., is my bet). But the nay-saying persists. The Village Voice, for example, calls him "the shortish, prickly doctor from Park Avenue." |
| | Doesn't matter. What we're seeing with Dean is setting new records every day for participatory democracy in a presidential election. Be interesting to see where it goes. |
It doesn't get better than this.
Content Cabinet Key
| | JD shares his key to Business 2.0's subscriber-only magazine article archives, which I found so bothersome to access yesterday. (It still doesn't work, for me at least, with Mozilla on Linux, Konqueror on Linux, Safari on OS X or even IE on OS X. It does work, however, with Mozilla on OS X.) |
| | Several years into the phenomenon, even with solid tools like Blogger available, the blogging community is still, for the most part, self-absorbed and elitist. There's only minimal evidence that anyone is using the blog format as a business tool. And, other than Drudge and Pud, can you think of anyone making a living off of blogging? Even the often interesting and provocative postings from top-tier bloggers like Dan Gillmor, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger are endlessly self-referential. They're all quoting one another, sending readers in a circle. It's like a revolving door with no escape. And so much of the talk is inside baseball: "RSS," "Daypop," "Technorati," "Blogdex," and "Link Cosmos" mean nothing to those not steeped in blog culture. The medium itself is still the main topic of conversation. Boring. No wonder so few people read blogs. |
| | You don't have to believe me on this. Finally, some data asserts that blogs are hardly a popular pursuit. If anything, blogging is more marginal than its critics contend. Forrester Research (FORR) conducted an online survey of 3,673 people and found that 79 percent of its respondents had never heard of blogs, 98 percent had never read one, and 98 percent said they'd never pay to read or write one. Blogs can be wonderful things, but if a mere 2 percent of Internet users read blogs, the pastime is far from mainstream. The Forrester survey notes that the typical blog reader has been using the Web for an average of six years. For the most part, blogs feature the Net elite writing to the Net elite. This continues to be the case only as long as the elite are underemployed. |
| | Quality blogging requires ample free time. Just like online games, the number of active blogs will, I suspect, experience a dip in popularity once people return to the workforce. Just as it's hard to stay up all night playing EverQuest regularly if you have to be at your desk at 9 a.m., it's hard to comment on multiple webpages if you have to use your computer for something other than aimless surfing. The notion of an online diary is powerful, and I have no doubt that, ultimately, it will inch toward the mainstream. But today's blog frenzy, in which every journalist, political candidate, and tech exec feels it's a must to sound off on whatever comes to mind, will subside shortly. After all, at least 98 percent of the potential audience doesn't care. Blogging may be fun, daring, comical, and a lot of other wonderful things, but, except in the rarest of cases, it's not essential to business. |
| | Not to be defensive or anything, but this is a load. |
| | First, so what if blogs aren't mainstream? Why should The Mainstream exclusively confer legitimacy? And what the hell is that legitimacy anyway, other than a big media stick for whupping on stuff that isn't? And what makes bloggers any more elite than the next 2% slice of some survey? |
| | Second, the number of business blogs already verges on the countless. Check Google. Follow the links, whose don't even count bizblogs behind firewalls, which are plenty. |
| | Third, one big reason people blog is that it doesn't take ample free time. As I've said before, it's like answering email in public. Guess when all those bloggers get jobs they'll stop writing email too. |
| | Fourth, Technorati follows hundreds — even thousands — more blogs every day. After starting with around 100,000 early this year, it's currently watching 904,435 of them. That would be 2% of what, Jimmy? |
| | We could get all fancy and talk about magazine concepts like pass-along rates, and secondary audiences, but the reality is much simpler. Name one major on-line news vendor that hides text content behind registration. CNN ? No. MSN?, No. ESPN? Tried it, gave up. |
| | I'm mystified that somehow publishers think that OLD content is somehow the same as PREMIUM content. CNN tries to sell video, I guess if I didn't have a TV I might even buy the One Pass deal to try to watch Jeanie Mose sometimes, but old news isn't news. And Google is a master archive of all text content that vastly exceeds the quality of any single content source, no matter how authoritative. It takes seconds to find a replacement for firewalled archive content, in the e-retail sector they figured this out a long time ago. |
| | When switching costs are zero for customers, you can't afford high customers acquisition costs. Or in simpler terms, you'd better have really, really good ice cream if you are trying to sell it while the guy on the other side of the street is giving it away to get people into his store. |
| | Then, his highly quotable (and very wise) conclusion: |
| | Hey Business 2.0! Give away the text content, have people pay a subscription fee for an RSS feed, create a quality newsletter with paid sponsorship. Get some of those good reporters of yours on the blogging tip, link excessively and watch the Google juice pour your way: |
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