|
Wednesday, February 12, 2004
The teach goes on 
Boingdotted
| | So World of Ends, which Dr. Weinberger and I wrote a year ago and haven't touched since, somehow acquired a huge amount of traffic today. Where did it come from? |
Are we still parked?
| | Anybody who drives a stick shift knows the hardest part is first gear; because you're trying to change a body at rest to a body in motion. In the rest of the forward gears, you're just managing motion. |
| | For all the intense discussion going on online and in the hallways about what the Dean campaign did or didn't do right, and on how social software tools can empower people, I'm amazed by how little interaction this community seems to have with people who actually know something about social movements, political organizing and power analysis. Perhaps that's a reflection of how new to politics so many of the people here seem to be, and that's ok. After all, DeanforAmerica (my shorthand for the decision to try to run an "open-source"-style campaign, as opposed to Howard Dean the candidate for President) clearly inspired many people both in and outside of the hacking community and the A-list blogging community to get excited about personal political participation, and hopefully that will be a lasting thing. |
| | But people here talk like all that's needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There's almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why. |
| | Wondering what will happen next with the movement-in-formation that we've seen in and around the Dean campaign? One answer is to watch this url: www.ChangeForAmerica.com/blog. |
| | His point: we're going to need a lot more than blogs and tools. We'll need to be organized. |
Dean on Dean, et. al.
| | Dubya and his people will run a savage campaign. Willie Horton will seem like fluff compared to what the RNC has in store. Whomever is the eventual Democratic nominee will be subjected to a brutal offense from the Republicans. They have amassed an enormous war chest and will take no prisoners in their campaign. |
High dissatisfaction level
| | T-Mobile just offered me 2000 miles to complete a survey. I'm a sucker for travel promos, so I bit. I should have known something clueless was happening when the first question went this way: |
| | How did your laptop computer become enabled for using the T-Mobile HotSpot service? |
| | It came with a Intel Centrino wireless chip already built in- I bought and installed a wireless card myself
- My company bought and installed the wireless card
- Other
|
| | No sense that any wireless laptops might come with a cpu other than Centrino. |
| | Then I got 75% through the survey when the page ended in the middle of a multiple choice question. I had no choice but to abandon the survey. |
| | I've heard a lot lately about the relatively high quality of T-Mobile's customer support. Maybe they'll listen and make their surveys easier for everybody. |
| | Or get RightNow Metrics, which built the survey, to test it on more browser/laptop combinations. |
The Large Now
| | Been hanging around the Long Now site, and thinking about Deep Time. A risk of getting older, I guess. Certainly a good way to put politics into perspective. |
| | My perusals this morning led me to the very cool Earth Impact Database, and its collection of images. The 600-million year old Beaverhead crater in Montana, is 60km wide and visible only on gravity maps. The biggest one on Earth is the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It's 300km wide, 2023 million years old and visible in a variety of ways. The coolest is Manicouagan, which appears to be a circular river in Quebec. It's 100km across and 214 million years old. |
Clark out
| | Wes Clark ended his candidacy last night after losing in Tennessee and elsewhere. His is the first primary campaign with a large Internet-based community to call it quits. It will be interesting to watch the Campaign Blog and other pages at the campaign site to see what happens to the energy, the people, the tools, the archival materials. I'm also looking forward to seeing Cam get back to his blog. |
There are responses to this message:
Copyright 2009 The Doc Searls Weblog
|
