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Thursday, December 30, 2004
What he said 
Evil of axis
| | Giuseppe Bianco, Director of the Centro di Geodesia Spaziale in Matera (Italy), has announced this afternoon that following the earthquake which hit the Asian coasts on 26th dec, the terrestrial axis shifted two thousandths of an arcsecond. |
Power From the People, Part N
| | Connected Campaign Conundrum is Britt Blaser's latest essay on connected democracy (with helpful distinctions between running for office (campaigning), and running the office (governance), both of which will ultimately derive, as the founders promised, their just powers from the governed. He also limns some service bridges between the two: |
| | Rather than quaking in fear that their web site won't be sufficient to defeat the Big Bad Incumbent, politicians should be relishing how their web services can uniquely deliver the miracle the Dean campaign hinted at. The almost accidental triumph of the Dean campaign was to register voters as members of the campaign's web services. It seemed only naturalmost web sites seek to know who's visiting. But from a political viewpoint, it was huge, though it didn't go far enough. In meatspace, supporters evolve from citizenship through registration to going to the polls to pulling the right lever. I suggest that the great untapped vein of political gold is hosting those evolutions, explicitly, within the candidate's online community. |
| | And, of course, the call for blogging, which is how politicians get out from behind mouthpieces and speak in their authentic voices: |
| | How will the voters know that a candidate's ego is in remission? They'll recognize an authentic voice expressed in blog posts and comments and podcasts which project an authentic personality into the agora of public esteem, rather than using ad copywriters to project an ego into the ether of non-reality TV. Blogging is a personal skill that's prime to become a requisite for politicians, because it can be as good a megaphone for them as it is for ordinary citizens who are using blogs to project themselves in the universal struggle for acknowledgement, armed only with their inimitable reasonableness, curiosity, candor and irony. |
| | The voters have never been allowed into the game of high-stakes politics because the candidates¹ trusted advisors would rather rule in defeat than be a smaller part of a larger movement. |
| | So the trick is to host an online deliberative body (often called a government) of, by and for the people. As soon as they realize they have access to decision-making that's truly not politics as usual, they¹ll jump in and recruit their neighbors, one begetting five, begetting 25, etc. When those thousandsthe most connected and committedreach out one more circle, into meatspace, the election is locked up. |
| | The people will do it, starting small, if we give them the community-building tools, if we listen to their interests, if we document their connected campaign¹s passion for their views and if we document the growth of their circles of committed voters. |
| | It sounds straightforward because it is. It sounds impossible because no candidate has really listened to the people. |
| | Bonus link: Dave Pentecost, who was hanging with Britt the last time the three of us talked (about Britt's latest, above), and who has pointage to why the iPod is really a hardware extension of iTunes, regardless of real cool efforts to prove otherwise. |
Some of the News that's fit to syndicate, some of the time
| | I've always thought the Times should just quit making it hard to link permanently to its archives, and let the search engines grant it the authority it has earned. Meanwhile, the paper continues to deny that authority by locking up most of its >week-old editorial (I refuse to say "content") behind a linkproof costwall. (Yes, there is at least one exception, for which I'm grateful, but why not make the expeption the rule?) |
| | Meanwhile, all this conditional business around what stuff is linkable, and what isn't, and from where, is just a huge PITA for everybody. |
Stay tuned
| | Yesterday, or the day before (I forget which), I had a post about my conversations with Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic for the G'Day World podcast. It went to some kind of purgatory (partially posted for awhile there) before it went all the way to hell. So, to repeat... I was interviewed over Skype, which has sound so good it's scary. Even talking through the built-in mike on my laptop, I sounded fine, they tell me. We'll hear when the podcast is up. Unfortunately the G'Day World site seems to be having some bandwidth threshold excess problems. My guess is that they'll be back up for sure when the New Year comes, which is sooner for them than the rest of us, being on the leading side of the dateline and all. |
| | I'll also be in Part 2 (I hear) of Effern's Sound of Vision podcast about marketing at The Vision Thing. That was conducted over the phone, which does have the advantage of zero (apparent) propogation delay. With Skype (expecially over the distance between Down Under and Up Over), the delay was so long I was inclined to filibuster or wait through stretches of dead air to make sure I heard what the G'dudes were saying, and wasn't stepping on any of it. A quibble, but interesting anyway. |
Off the level
| | More proof that the market costs of not leveling with people can exceed the marketing benefits of pulling wool, however thin, over customers' eyes. Especially customers who blog about it later. One sample: |
| | Although the BzzAgent founders and website vehemently declare that their "agents" are on the up-and-up, and that honesty is encouraged, the lure of lucre -- or more likely, the lure of a shortcut to some sort of feeling of mass-produced "cool" -- is going to be too great. |
| | These people, and this model, break the implied social contracts between individuals, the contracts that say "I'm interacting with you because I value you, and I value spending time with you." Once the trust and the implicit social contract is broken, one's antennae need to be up at all times, even moreso than before. |
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