From the Las Vegas Sun:
Christian Avard works on a Web posting Monday for www.docudharma.com inside “The Big Tent,” where Web writers ply their trade near the Democratic National Conven-tion. “This is a long way from the gold lame of the Riv,” says a Democratic strategist, referring to the Riviera, which hosted a convention two years ago for liberal bloggers.
Our intrepid reporter Christian Avard and Docudharma are featured prominently above a nice article about New Media/blogging by J. Patrick Coolican. I like his first paragraph!
DENVER – This is the headquarters of the vast left-wing conspiracy. They’re all here: MoveOn.org, Media Matters and Markos Moulitsas, and if a bomb went off, Bill O’Reilly wouldn’t be disappointed.
There is also a nice comment from John Podesta, President Clinton’s ex chief of staff on how blogging has changed the relationships in politics and journalism. Go read the article, though of course, the picture is worth a thousand words!
More blogging on blogging below the fold, as we bloggers say!
From the Christian Science Monitor, starting with a quote from some obscure blogger…..
Bloggers at Democratic convention plant their stake
“The traditional media do a lot of things wrong. We want them to do things correctly. We want them to do their job,” says Markos Moulitsas, founder of the blog Daily Kos, which claims some 1.5 million unique hits a month.
snip…
But wherever bloggers sit, they are a presence at this convention as never before.
“We’re seeing how incredibly powerful it is to assemble the networks and the globosphere. It literally has its own gravitational pull, there are so many millions of readers,” says Dan Mahoney, who blogs on YourHub.com in Denver. Big Tent organizers say they are also getting calls from politicians and others eager to gain Netroots exposure.
Markos again:
“For bloggers “to get together, it’s affirming,” he says. “We [usually] work in isolation – it’s not like a newsroom where you’re working with your colleagues. We’re in isolation and every once in awhile we get to come together and share in a big experience, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world. It feels part of a broader movement and we need that affirmation.”
the San Jose Mercury News…
Blog Shack: At new media tent, words and beer flow freely
DENVER – Think of it as Animal House, but with a corporate sponsor. The free beer starts at 1 p.m. The couches are comfy. And the words flow from the Big Tent day and night.
snip… Markos is getting TONS of ink
Yes, argued Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos. Google’s free massages and fruity smoothies (antioxidants before carbohydrate-laden beer), doesn’t mean bloggers are going soft. But the California-style amenities have generated lots of press coverage.
Blogs are only “growing, growing, growing,” said Moulitsas. “The bottom line is that people no longer want to be spectators. Technology allows us to essentially become participants.”snip…
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, is blogging from the Big Tent, too.
“I’ve been a couch potato, but this election is just too darned important,” Newmark said. “But this is how the media is changing. It gives guys like me a place and an opportunity to raise our voices.”
There are 15,000 credentialed media with access to the convention, but only 120 bloggers. That however, is a nice big leap in recognition. Only 36 bloggers were grudgingly allowed “inside” in 2004. And it seems like The Big Tent is grabbing enough attention to reinforce the importance of blogging. Apparently folks like Dan Rather and T. Boone Pickens are speaking IN the Big Tent TO bloggers. It seems that the Tradmed are still more interested in reporting on the novelty, the “cuteness” of the efforts by those DFH, blogging amateurs….their competition, now, haha….but every story on bloggers in the Dead Tree Press brings more folks online and to the blogs to see what the fuss is about, and that is exactly what we need to have happen for the voice…and impact, of blogs to grow.
Why even the
MoonyWashington Times an article!
At the 2008 convention here, several hundred bloggers have a two-story media center, parties to attend and their own panel discussions, including “Who’s Driving Whom?: The Blogosphere vs. the Mainstream Media.”That’s a good question.
snip…
For now, the biggest differences are the perspectives and the story length, said Joseph Graf, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies blogs and politics. Bloggers who captain their own sites tend to report from a particular perspective, be it liberal, conservative or gender politics. Posts may be much shorter than typical newspaper stories, but they also are more likely to be passionate or inspire readers to take political action.
“Bloggers have an important role,” Mr. Graf said. “In some cases, major media have co-opted blogging. But bloggers for mainstream media sites don’t bring the attitude of independent bloggers.”
Clearly, the corporate and political worlds are recognizing the power of the blogger….
From The Herald: An event made for movers, shakers and bloggers
Apart from anything else, the DNC 08 will be remembered for how political conferences will from now on be covered; it will be the first true cyber-convention, a blogger’s heaven.
snip…
While Obama and the Democrats have embraced the new technology, the Republicans and their choice John McCain, in particular, appear to be lagging behind a little. While the party uses the web to churn out its message just like the Democrats, it does not use text messaging. Meantime, the 72-year-old McCain is said to use the internet rarely.
If the web does have an influence on how Americans view the race to the White House, it seems Obama and the Democrats could already have a head start.
Fun stuff!
And have a link to Al Rodgers (pic heavy, slightly pro-Obama) diary on Dkos for more convention fun!
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heehee
…but none today yet.
we have a mighty fine page today.
Mighty fine.
Congratulations! Not to mention, I am really loving reading the posts and seeing the pics.
… claimed the couches in the photo for Docu “frickin’ Dharma! Anyone else trying to sit in them will get a foot in their ass!
Spread the word.
Obama isn’t going to save the Earth.
Oh, sure, it would be nice if the Democrats were to pay lip service to such a goal. But there’s this little problem of AGENCY — of HOW the Earth is to be saved.
Abrupt climate change is a good place to start. Let’s use Kenneth Burke’s “Pentad” heuristic to understand how our stories of climate change problem and climate change solution contrast.
In Burke’s imagination, the “Pentad” are five rhetorical elements which can be found in any narrative, and they explain how motives function within narratives. The pentad is constituted by five terms: act, agent, agency, scene, purpose. These correspond loosely to the what, who, how, where, and why of journalistic reportage.
First, the “problem” narrative of abrupt climate change:
Act: Human-caused climate change, caused by industrial carbon burning.
Agents: Carbon dioxide “polluters” — people burning fossil fuels at the rate of 85 million bbls./day.
Agency: There are two agencies here. 1) Industrial equipment (power plants, automobiles, airplanes) burns carbon-laden fossil fuels, producing atmospheric CO2. 2) Increases in the carbon dioxide content of Earth’s atmosphere will heat up average temperatures on planet Earth as the excess CO2 circulates globally. This will skew weather patterns in favor of extreme weather events and alter ecosystems drastically, thus wiping out habitats throughout the world.
Scene: Planet Earth.
Purpose: Human industry — human industry itself has a number of purposes — the most important of these purposes has got to be the operation of “businesses,” either government or private, which form the raison d’etre of the modern economy. Those who are said to be out of the “business” loop of the modern economy are also said to be “unemployed,” i.e. not performing economically.
Now let’s look at the “solution” narrative:
Act: There are a wide variety of acts contemplated under the banner of “fighting global warming” — tree-planting, seeding the Earth with carbon dioxide absorbers, carbon dioxide sequestration, and so on. Often “alternative energy” is placed in this category, under the assumption that if industries had “carbon neutral” energy sources they would stop burning carbon.
Agent:There are typically a variety of agents given here — ordinary people, or industry, or governments.
Scene: Planet Earth, again.
Purpose: “Saving the Earth,” being “sustainable,” avoiding “collapse” (see Jared Diamond’s book Collapse or Mark Lynas’ Six Degrees for more speculation on the possibility of civilization-wide collapse), and so on: these motives are often quite vague, as if patrons of the environment were trying to be unclear about what exactly they wanted to do.
Now here comes the clincher:
Agency: I don’t know. How precisely are we to save planet Earth?