Dave Cullen: Blogs

If you thought YOUR youth was fleeting . . .

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:33:35 GMT

Well, it whizzes by pretty fast for a human, but for a new art form . . .

Or communication form . . .

I'd say it officially ended for blogland with the current dispute over Kos accepting money from Dean and other unnamed candidates while writing about them during the last election cycle--about Dean for sure; the others, who knows, hence the problem.

Two good pieces about it from our two best web sources, Salon and Slate (more or less)--Scott Rosenberg and Chris Suellentrop, respectively.

Have you been following any of this? Man. Quite the eruption of anger, frustration and middle fingers at this pivotal moment in the blog childhood. I certainly understand it. We're essentially facing a call for new rules of some sort, more restrictions, tighter self-policing . . .

Who the hell wants that?

Well . . .

I blog, addictively. I've tried to quit several times, but I just enjoy it too much. I love the freedom I have there -- express myself a lot more loosely than I would in a magazine or newspaper (and in my case, lazily; I don't even proofread for typos there.)

So the last thing I really want is rules. Except . . .

Except come on. Nobody gets away with a blissfully stringless world where can jaunt about all day gushing out art and opinions with never a question raised about the man, woman, family or corporation(s) quietly supplying the money to feed, house and entertain you. Not if you want an audience to actually consume your work.

Even if you're Pablo Picasso, if you were accepting large sums from some predecessor to Amnesty International for six months before you painted Guernica, you can bet you'd have a lot of 'splaining to do. Your admirers and detractors would still be arguing about it 50 years later. With good reason.

It's not pleasant. It's nicer to answer to no one. And for awhile, we could. Blogs were so new, so fragmented, so inconsequential to the larger culture at first, we could do anything we wanted. Infants get away with anything.

But the minute we started having a real impact, we should have seen those days were numbered. Once you DO matter, you enter a vastly different arena, and the rules really are different. I'm certainly not suggesting the same rules as journalists--I love my blog freedom, and I'm not ready to adhere to all the rules of journalism there, but it would be silly an irresponsible to presume that I don't have any rules to live by.

I understand the urge for people like Kos to lift their middle finger. But he’s a smart man, smart enough that he’ll be embarrassed by that response one day.

For the period in question, I think disclosure of the Dean money was fine. I remember thinking about it at the time, and thinking that we’re all muddling along here, he’s putting tremendous time into this blog, and he needs the freedom to pursue an income and pursue this blog. And he’s being up-front about it, so fine.

(Though my inclination is also to agree with Chris Suellentrop that Kos was wrong in refusing to disclose which other candidates he worked for, even while setting up funding drives to support certain candidates. )

But that was 2003-2004. The blogworld changed fast. He ended that election cycle a completely different force than he began it. It would be way, way, way irresponsible to do it in again in 2008, or even 2006.

He did nothing wrong taking money from Dean. But that doesn’t me, he, you, me, or anyone else can get live by those rules in the future.

In Kos' case--or the case of any blog that wants to be taken remotely seriously in the political realm--that means no money from politicians. That's a no-brainer. (I won't repeat those arguments. Check out the Slate piece or any number of others if it seems kind of brainerish to you.)

Other blogs, other choices. We're all starting to face them.

It was never money for me, because nobody ever offered me money for my blog services. The toughest one for me involves my personal life: how much of sordid details can reveal and still be respected as a journalist? But that's a restriction imposed from the other direction. A better example for this discussion is my ability to discuss other artists, writers, reality-show contestants . . . I assumed I could trash anybody out there who I thought deserved it. I was just a speck out in the great void, it's not like I was going to offend them personally.

Then I got an email from a writer asking why I had written about her work so mercilessly. Man. I felt like crap. Never expected her to read it. And when I went back and reread it, I had been pretty careless in dismissing her anyway. It was more a disagreement in taste.

That was the first of tough lessons for me that what I write there can have consequences. Which imposes responsibilities on me, whether I want to acknowledge them or not. I can decide which ones I'm willing to accept, but they're still there.

It seems a little silly that I had to learn that one. I've been a journo for years, and of course I know I have to think through my critique very carefully if I "published" it. But the blog was supposed to be different. I could act a lot looser there, just share my opinions as I might hanging out with a group of friends. Salon was big enough to get noticed, my blog was just a speck, so I could say whatever I wanted.

Not in the age of google. And not with the amount of effort I was putting into the blog at that time. The more energy I devoted to it, the higher my google rank rose, and the more likely people I was writing about would stumble upon themselves there.

Welcome to responsibilityland. Of course I still had the constitutional right to trash anybody I felt like, but I could no longer do it in blissful ignorance that it would never hurt anyone.

I imposed a new set of rules on myself. But I get lots of exceptions. Reality-show contestants, for one. The way I see it, the whole reason for their television existence lies in chiefly in our ability to have fun with them: to pick the ones we like and dislike, the ones we admire and the ones that drive us freaking nuts! That’s what they’re there for, they know that, they buy into that by participating, so they’re really fair game.

(Unlike, say politicians or actors or any forms of artists. Most of them are there for politics or art, and their fame is a byproduct--integral to their reach, but not the goal in itself. Different set of rules, in my book.)

Reality contestants are an easy exception. The rest of my rules get kind of fuzzy sometimes. I'm still working them out, but I've got a pretty good idea in most cases, and I still feel comfy acting a lot looser here than I would "in print." We'll see how long that lasts. Or whether I regret it.

But nothing is nearly as loose as the day I first signed up for this blog 2.5 years ago.

Childhood is over friends. Hope you got in on the fun while we were still kids. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted. I know I did.

Bloggers at the convention

Tue, 27 Jul 2004 00:58:20 GMT

I have mixed feelings about not applying for blog press credentials. Too much going on in my life this summer. Got to focus. Still, it would have been a blast.

So instead, I direct you to my friend Jeralyn Merritt, who does the TalkLeft blog. She's got three posts up already, and you can really catch the enthusiasm so missing from the newsmodels on TV.

She was featured in the blog stories by both the NYT and W Post today. The Times actually opened with her, and the Post used a picture of her, so you can finally see what she looks like. If I weren't a homo . . .

Really enjoying watching her light up.

Here's a quote from the Post piece:

"I'm committed to seeing Bush out of office in November and want to do what I can to help," says Jeralyn Merritt, a Denver defense lawyer who writes the TalkLeft blog. "To me the purpose of a convention is solidarity and getting strength from each other and renewed commitment to a joint purpose. I am a cheerleader. I am a partisan. I am an advocate. My goal is to get everyone else stirred up."

And lets contrast that to hacknews quote from Newsweek's Howard Fineman:

Newsweek's Howard Fineman, who will be filing online dispatches from his BlackBerry on the convention floor, calls it "a real-time EKG of my response to the convention as a reporter and a yakker. We're all going to spend our time reading each other's blogs and blog our way to oblivion. If there was any real news, we'd all be too busy to blog."

Blech! He really talks that way.

Meanwhile, Salon's Tim Grieve, just posted a great story on the first afternoon:

"That flag is our flag"
Veterans, led by war heroes Wesley Clark and Max Cleland, charge out of the trenches in Boston for John Kerry

Reading the story gave me the shivers. Exactly what this party has needed for 30 years now. The big question in my mind: Why did they relegate it to an afternoon slot? This should have been the main event one night.

Oh well. It's a start.

World O'Crap

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 20:21:46 GMT

I barely get enough time to write my damn blog, so I don't know how people ever find the team to read a bunch of them regularly too. I finally got around to checking out one I had heard a lot about -- World O'Crap -- and it made me smile repeatedly.

Great attitude, fun writing style. And lots of insight.

She just wrapped up two days of relentlessly defending the left from rightwing attackdogs trying to make hay out of the fact that we finally tracked down Saddam Hussien -- as if that suddenly justifies the mess we've created over there. I wish I had the strength to do all that. Fun little swipe at the notorious Andrew Sullivan in a post called The Magic Ends Too Soon.

Hopefully the title is enough to give you a taste of her style. It's indicative of the rest to follow. Here's another morsel from a little earlier:

Now, let's check in with Hannity and Nonentity. Why, it seems that Sean is asking Al D'Amato and Geraldine Ferraro how the Democratic candidates can be stupid enough to stay in the race, now that 59% of Americans say that we should have gone to war with Iraq. (Well, it's actually it was 62% on Sunday -- that 3% increase is the big news which Sean is trying to exploit; but we should give him a break, because he was born too early for for Bush's "No Sean Left Behind" program, which would ensure that all Fox hosts learn reading and math.)

I've added her to my blogroll down there on the left, so you can find her later if you forget to bookmark.

Hopefully I won't dig a little deeper and learn she's hopelessly lobbying for John Kerry for president or something.

Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 19:49:11 GMT

A great little site called Walter In Denver (great taste in music, among other things) has just begun a nice little weekly feature called Rocky Mountain Blog Roundup.

Believe it or not, there are some really interesting, and/or popular Colorado blogs, including Walter, TalkLeft, WorldWide Rant, VodkaPundit and ResurrectionSong. (I'm forgetting somebody.)

This feature picks the best post of the week from each, so have yourself a little sample. I chose a dark one.

becarefulwhatyoutype

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 14:05:01 GMT

Be careful. I just typed in littletinypenis.com and got a porn site, by mistake. I meant tinylittlepenis.com, which is the fun little url for The Rabbit Blog. Man, she must have started that thing ages ago to edge out all the pornsters buying up all those urls. And she later bought http://www.rabbitblog.com/ and redirects to it, so you don't have to worry about your work thinking you're a weird freak into small dicks.

Hennyway, mainly writing to say how much I've been henjoying her little blog lately. She's doing the love-counselor thing at the moment, responding to letters, and something about the freakishness of a few of the letters and her picking just the right tone to respond that made me feel better this weekend when I was wallowing in my own crap.

And it's written by Heather Havrilesky, who Salon's wonderful TV critic, Most Gifted Writer of the moment, and finalist for Most Gifted Writer Ever there, in a dead heat with her good friend and predecessor in the position, Carina Chocano, who opened up the position by moving to Entertainment Weekly (a year ago?), but has just moved on/up to the LA Times, as their TV critic. In Heather's words:

Now Carina will be taking Howard Rosenberg's place, substituting his rather straightforward reviews with her sharp, funny, imaginative writing.

Check them both out. And be prepared to snicker.

Activities to avoid when you're drunk . . .

Sun, 12 Oct 2003 22:59:14 GMT

Those would include blogging.

Please remind me never to blog after ten or more drinks.

No matter how much of it I have danced off.

Luckily I have the power to delete it. I try to avoid using that power very often, but I think we're all better off without the retarded post that once sat here.

Bush Blogwatch: more shameless distortion

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 20:54:55 GMT

Man, if you had any doubts about the integrity of the Bush presidency, just check out his blog.

Everybody is going to do some spinning of their news, but his blog is just one gross distortion after another. His people just have no integrity whatsoever, do they?

Today's swill:

A piece titled "Return of power brightens Iraqis" summarizes a USA Today piece as a gleefull story about the lights coming on in Iraq, saying how great things are now compared to pre-war Iraq.

What a crock! I guess they assume their readers are all lemmings and won't actually follow the link.

The actual story paints a much bleaker picture, with people pissed as hell that we threw the country into darkness for six straight months, and relieved that it's finally back on. The Bush blog segues into the story this way:

Written from Baghdad, a piece in today’s USA Today captures the people’s excitement as the lights come back on and the positive effects their newfound power is having on Iraq’s burgeoning economy.

But conveniently leaves out passages from the piece like this:

The lack of electricity has angered Iraqis and created problems for the U.S.-led coalition.

As for the blog spin that Iraqis are rejoicing about being better off than before, that's just pure bull. The piece actually quotes megawatt figures in question:

Power output reached 4,461 megawatts this week, exceeding the prewar level of 4,107 megawatts in February. A year ago it was 4,867 megawatts. But electricity demand is down now because many factories and businesses are closed.

So they're ahead of the period where both countries were preparing for war, but still not up to levels before it all began. All in all, pretty close, but hardly any great improvement.

And of course, the little downside: the power matters less because the economy has ground to a halt. Factories are not running, businesses shut down . . . That sounds promising.

Those Bushies. Liars, liars, liars. Yes, things apparently are starting to improve a bit--from the fire back up to the frying pan, perhaps--but this rosy picture of the country back on its feet and people dancing in the streets . . . Why don't they just level with people and admit how long it's going to take, and how damn slow and painful it's going to be.

---

On a smaller front, here's the opening of his latest post:

Markets React to Jobless Claims

CBS Marketwatch is reporting that U.S. stock indexes have surged to new yearly highs after a fall in jobless claims released this morning suggest a strengthening economic recovery and better than expected third-quarter growth.

Here's the actual sentence from CBS Marketwatch: "The major U.S. stock indexes surged to new yearly highs after a fall in initial unemployment claims suggested the economic recovery may no longer be jobless and Yahoo's better than expected third-quarter report emboldened buyers."

If you know anything about the stock market, you know that earnings reports from key companies like Yahoo move the markets in big ways. That may well have had the great impact. (And the next sentence added a third reason (though it was also related to the economy).

Reminds me of the movie quote-ads, that will take a statement like, ". . . in a truly dreadful year, this is perhaps the best movie of the summer so far," and run an ad with a banner head saying, "Roger Ebert raves, 'best movie of the summer!'

At least they didn't completely distort this one. It was half true. But only half. I guess that's above average in the World of Immorality where the conservatives reside.

Wesley Clark's Campaign Manager Quits

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 01:41:00 GMT

From AP, within the hour:

Wesley Clark 's campaign manager quit Tuesday in a dispute over the direction of the Democratic presidential bid, exposing a rift between the former general's Washington-based advisers and his 3-week-old Arkansas campaign team.

Donnie Fowler told associates he was leaving over widespread concerns that supporters who used the Internet to draft Clark into the race are not being taken seriously by top campaign advisers. Fowler also complained that the campaign's message and methods are focused too much on Washington, not key states, said two associates who spoke on condition of anonymity. . . .

Fowler has been at odds with communications adviser Mark Fabiani of California and policy adviser Ron Klain of Washington. All three are veterans of Al Gore 2000 presidential campaign . . .

From the start, there has been tension between the campaign's political professionals and the draft-Clark supporters, many of whom consider computer-savvy Fowler their ally.

Fowler has complained that while the Internet-based draft-Clark supporters have been integrated into the campaign, their views are not taken seriously by Fabiani, Klain and other top advisers, many of them based in Washington. He has warned Clark's team that the campaign is being driven from Washington, a charge leveled against Gore's campaign in 2000 even though its headquarters were in Tennessee. Clark's headquarters are in Little Rock, Ark.

Yow. So much there that is so scary.

For starters, it's always a bad sign to see so much dissent so early in a campaign.

More unnerving to see the same guys that lost the election Gore should have won easily winning out in a battle that from my perspective they surely should have lost. (More on that below.)

And all the worse to see them falling into the same trap that helped do them in last time. In 2000, they responded to charges that they were beltway insiders out of touch with the country by moving the HQ to Nashville--which as far as anyone could tell did nothing but change their scenery.

The best thing Clark had going for him was that he had an organization already in place, set up all across the country. Granted I have only seen the operations in one mid-sized state (I'm in Denver, if you've never noticed the logo at the top of this page), but it was pretty impressive. I have been assuming it was all the stronger in the larger states.

Effectively throwing that away by centralizing everything and not taking those people seriously--God, it sounds like the same old Washington insider/assholes.

I would have thought they would have learned a thing or two from the Dean campaign. It has been the model of combining centralization and decentralization. All the strategy, all the scheduling, all the big decisions come out of Burlington, but the 400,000 volunteers who have signed up really have been encouraged to run around out there and start their own initiatives. Just look at the huge blogroll down the side of Dean's blog: each one of those represent a different initiative somebody out there in the field started, rarely at the behest of anyone in the campaign.

But apparently Clark has turned to a bunch of old-school advisers who surely know a lot about campaigning, but not enough to get Gore into the White House, and not enough to learn a damn thing from the way the Dean campaign has been revolutionizing the process.

That's very depressing news.

Depressing because I thought we were going to have two great candidates battling it out in the primaries. We still may, but this is not a good sign at all for Wesley Clark.

---

Thanks to Instapundit for the link, via Dave Winer, though the former doesn't seem to have read the story closely, because he mischaracterizes the central dispute. (Kinda surprising.)

Update:

Reuters just posted its version six minutes ago. They say he quit "after being asked to take a reduced role in the fledgling operation, two Clark campaign sources said." That may or may not just be their spin on the mess as the mopped the blood up off the floor.

Otherwise, their version is basically the same.

Bush Blogwatch

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 19:48:39 GMT

I realize that any blog is going to have a point of view, and a presidential blog will be particularly propogandistic, but the new Bush blog is just too much.

Titles of the last two entries:

Progress Toward a Free Iraq
Afghan children are laughing and learning just two years after beginning of war

The first one is laughable, the second obscene.

---------

I got some great comments from some of you guys on my post last night about the horrifying arrival of the Bush blog (first powerful contender for the jump-the-shark moment in the history of blogging). (And here's an ominous omen--if you click on the link and glance up at the url, you'll find that was my post #666.)

This response from Ben was particularly insightful:

Yup. Web log > blog > politblog > e-newsletter with bulletin board posting available with real-time updating 24/7.

The Blog as a media form is still in a state of evolution. Unfortunately, the Bush blog represents a species that doesn't fit Darwinian standards, let alone what the rest of the world thinks a blog should be. If Bush's intent was to be the first President to have a blog site, well, let's go call the Smithsonian. History will probably still show how Dean's use of the blog revolutionized the election process.

My response: Agreed on both. The personal voice on Dean's blog is not Dean's, but it is personal.

----

(And I'm instituting a new feature here, which you'll find a link to in the left-hand sidebar: Bush Blogwatch. I'm not sure how often I'll update it. Depends how interesting and/or appalling the Bush blog becomes.)

Bush joins the party--blogging officially pronounced dead

Tue, 07 Oct 2003 08:27:26 GMT

Ugh. George Bush got a blog today. I hate to even link to it, but here it is.

I guess that makes blogs completely passe. The dork factor just soared through the roof.

So far, all they've got is Bush's schedule for today, and links to three news stories.

The real howler is that they brag about "offering the latest news and views from outside the Washington “Beltway” "--complete with annoying gratuitous quotes around beltway--and then follow immediately with stories/op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and W Post. So they're stretching all the way out to the heartland of NY? To Washington correspondents for rabid-right publications in NY? Wow. No beltway mentality there.

And they start off with two pieces grasping to make their case on WMD. Pitiful.

The initial response on the Dean blog.

blog hacking

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 07:43:24 GMT

Speaking of presidential blogs, someone purporting to be from the Kucinich camp, but more likely a Republican is hacking away at the

At 2:16 a.m., they began hitting the latest comment thread every minute or two with the same ridiculous post, mainly consisting of three words repeated for about two screens each time. (I won't broadcast it furhter here.) They have filled dozens of screens so far.

Unfortunate. I spent some time over at the Kerry blog about a month ago, where some people claiming to be Howard Dean backers were stirring up animosity. It's a simple strategy for dirty-tricks-minded Republicans to breed dissent among the Dems. Don't be taken in.

blogs in the presidential campaign

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 07:25:30 GMT

Salon's Scott Rosenberg has a thought-provoking commentary from a blogging conference, which featured a panel of bloggers from the presidential campaign's including Matthew Gross of the Dean blog:

Money raised is usually considered the ultimate yardstick of campaign success. But conference organizer Dave Winer pushed the speakers: Weren't they just using the Internet to raise money to buy TV ads? Why take money from the bright new distributed world of the Net only to feed it back into the Big Media machine? Why couldn't the candidates commit to responding to one question from blog visitors every day?

I think the panelists were all flummoxed by this line of questioning . . .

Read it. I think you'll find it interesting. I did. (And I added a comment in response.)

Blogging story cites Conclusive Evidence

Thu, 18 Sep 2003 09:11:38 GMT

The Rocky Mountain News explained blogs to its readers Monday, and highlighted several great local blogs in the story, including some of our favorites, like TalkLeft and WalterInDenver.

This blog was included in the sidebar (the sidebar! the nerve! heeheehee). Here's their take on this site:

Conclusive evidence of Dave Cullen's existence (http://blogs.salon.com/0001137): Denver journalist Dave Cullen (Salon, Slate, The New York Times) has a well-organized site with concise posts covering politics (he likes Howard Dean and Wesley Clark), pop culture (great on reality TV) and more.

That all sounds good to me, but this marks the first time in my life I've been called well-organized, or especially concise.

Blogging pays

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:02:38 GMT

Hey, I just got a call from an editor at a major paper. Saw my blog, wants me to write for them. Unfortunately, newspaper money is not great, but it's exposure, it's an outlet, and it's more money than you people are paying me. Heeheehee.

We're going to have lunch next week, so it's not going to be overnight before I have something there, and maybe it will never work out. But I think this one will, because I really liked the guy and I we're on the save wavelength. I'll keep you posted and link to story(s) as they appear.

The Fucking Joy of Cooking

Wed, 13 Aug 2003 22:42:56 GMT

There's this Salon blog called The Julie/Julia Project, which sounded maybe interesting, until I discovered it was about cooking Julia Child recipes. No thanks. But before you stop reading too, check out this excerpt from today's entry:

I am going to float a proposal here. Would it reduce the petty crime rate in New York City – hell, maybe even the rape, murder and pillage rates – to pass an ordinance forcing grocery stores to widen all their aisles by ten or twelve inches? Maybe, maybe not. All I know is, I was at Garden of Eden near Union Square last night at seven thirty buying a duck and canned chestnuts, and Garden of Eden is a great store, better stocked and cheaper than Zeytuna, a hell of a lot easier to get to than Fairway or Whole Foods, with a pleasant, helpful staff, plus they had my duck AND my chestnuts, a small miracle, I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find the place, but damned if after twenty minutes sidling hither & non that fucking bitch with the yoga mat strapped to her back (and don’t even get me started on women who walk around with yoga mats) who stood lollygagging about in the middle of the fucking aisle staring at plums or something, wasn’t inspiring gleeful visions of disembowelment. Forget about using a cart; you can barely get one of those handheld baskets around, once you have a baguette and a five-pound duck in it. The cans of chestnuts I was buying for the Puree de Marrons cost $7.50 each and I had to buy four of them, so between that and the $15 duck I was completely broke when I walked out of the store, but at least I had negotiated the eight-inch wide aisles designed, I guess, for the six-inch-wide asses of the models who live and work in the neighborhood, without knocking down a display of Pirates Booty or something.

Not bad. And not your mother's fucking Julia Child.

The sad part of this story is that it was sitting right there near the top of the list of Salon blogs the two months I've been blogging here, and it took the dowdy old NY Times to show me what was sitting there right in front of me. How uncool is that?

The Times published a lengthy piece (3 web pages) in today's Dining & Wine section, and that story is interesting, too. Here's the opening, followed by one of its excerpts from the blog:

JULIE POWELL is in the homestretch. She has 13 days and 22 recipes to go to complete what possibly only Julia Child has done. If she meets her Aug. 26 deadline, Ms. Powell will have cooked all 524 recipes in the 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Ms. Powell began climbing this culinary Mount Everest last summer, on Aug. 26, and has kept an amusing, irreverent and increasingly popular daily Web log of her progress on Salon, called the Julie/Julia Project (blogs.salon.com/0001399).

The story has a comical twist too, thanks to the Times' inability to utter the word fuck, which is like trying to quote Southpark without swearing. So they substitute the word cookie for fuck in each quote (seriously), and the results are naturally ludicrous:

"This Monday [cookie] is just [cookie] killing me." . . . Last week, when subway delays put her behind schedule, she wrote, outrageously, "I would like to interrupt this program for a long overdue firebombing of the New York subway system, but of course I can't because then I'd go to jail and I couldn't finish the Project. But holy [cookie cookie]."

My favorite quote directly from Julie:

"If I get this done, somehow it will all be O.K. It's better than being a secretary."

The one annoyance with the piece is that it doesn't say what's next when Julie finishes the project, aside from rest, a gym membership to work off all the butter, and a trip to see the Julia Child exhibit at the Smithsonian. But I've posed the question in her blog comments, so maybe she'll let us know.

Read fast. Just 13 days to go.

Picnics for bloggers and the working poor

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 18:25:50 GMT

A few announcements:

A site called The Working Poor Picnic is rounding up support and volunteer time for the working poor. Dean supporters have been asked to show their support, as part of the campaign's project to do public service by volunteers. (Now I can't remember what that's called.)

On a much less selfless note, if you live anywhere near Denver, local bloggers will be gathering for the second annual drunkfest of the year (sic) this Saturday, at the flagship bar owned by our new mayor. (Yes, we just elected a bar owner mayor. Overwhelmingly.) Details here.

Hip Denver writer?

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 19:52:20 GMT

I've been accused of (hipdom?) And living in Denver, though in the process I confess to lust for NY. And being a writer.

Jennie Dorris, the nightlife reporter for the Daily Camera, Boulder's daily paper, has a blog called Boulder @night, and she just started a "Hip Denver Writer Series." Se was sweet enough or misguided enough to ask me to be the first profile. (I can't see a way to link to individual posts, so if you're reading this after Aug 1, go to the Aug 1 entries.)

There's a whole lot of blabbing from me there. She asked me a bunch of questions by email, and I played around with the easy ones, left the harder ones to sit for a couple days, and then realized around midnight last night that I had reached my deadline, so I went back in there and just started to ramble. I thought she'd just pick a few highlights, but she used it all! Which is very kind--I just hope I didn't make an ass of myself.

I do mention my favorite place to go out in Denver, and it's a club called Amsterdam, so if you happen to live here, go tonight, because I don't want to be there all by myself at 4 a.m.

What makes them blog?

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 23:03:45 GMT

I just checked my mailbox, and 5280 (Denver's city magazine) was there, with my story on Colorado bloggers prominently placed. A few excerpts (I'm going to focus on quotes here, to give you other bloggers a voice):

[From TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merritt on why she loves to blog]: "When I'm on [FoxNews'] Hannity & Colmes, a milllion people may see me," she says. "But how many of those people are really interested in what I have to say? But when I blog, people are reading me because they're interested in the liberal viewpoint." [Then later in the piece:] "It's the response that keeps you going," she says. "People are really reading. And through the comments, you can see they're thinking and discussing. You know you've hit a chord, and it pumps you up."

...

"Everyone wants validation of their opinion," says Denverite Andy O'Reilly, one of four writers behind WorldWidRant.com. "Or at least to get in a fight about it." He chuckles at the last line, but he's not entirely joking. LIke any political junkie, he hungers for the stimulation of a vigorous debate.

And I'll give away my ending:

"I could either yell at the TV or write it and put it on the Internet," [VodkaPundit's Stephen] Green says. "I found it was a lot more fun to put it on the internet, although I do still yell at the television."

I loved that last quote. I knew the second he said it that I wanted to open or close the story with that idea.

They gave the piece really nice play, too. It was supposed to just be a little half-page quickie, but I wrote way long and they gave me the real estate. With graphics, it fills the whole page, too, the front page of The Atmosphere, which is the opening section of the magazine. (It's actually on the second page of that--the first right-hand page which is much better; reader eyes tend to see go right to the right-side pages, often miss the left).

Thanks to everyone who participated. I hope you're happy with it. Do let me know. My editor took out a bit of the fun stuff, but gave me the extra space (I wrote more than 50% longer than assigned and they gave me nearly all the extra real estate). All four bloggers on focused on are intact. Shew! They are: Jeralyn of TalkLeft, Stephen of VodkaPundit, Andy of WorldWideRant and Walter of WalterInDenver.

There's also a box listing "Ten Great Local Blogs," with urls to everybody's sites. I'm going to reproduce it below, because it will be a lot easier for you to click than to try to type it in from the magazine. I'll see if I can get them to post this on their site. And I will leave it in my intentionally misnamed "Eight Great Denver Blogs" link in my blogroll in the left column:

Talk Left: The politics of crime from a liberal perspective
Vodka Pundit: Politics, war, satire and recipes, from a libertarian angle
The World Wide Rant: Politics, religion, science, etc.
Rover Pundit: Eclectic: politics, computers, great big trucks
Walter In Denver: Libertarian politics and golf
Rant-O-Rama!: Fun-loving anecdotes
Resurrection Song: Politics and culture, moderately conservative
The Blog of the Century of the Week: Eclectic: movies, technology, unemployment
Coyote Gulch: Detailed election coverage, especially local
Amygdala : Libertarian politics

And one I didn't know about when I turned in the piece:

Mike's Weblog Streams of consciousness from a queer Denver lunatic (his words; but he's pretty sane.)

The mag hits newstands tomorrow. It will be in all the grocery chains, but may take the distributor a few days. Tattered Cover normally gets it up in the morning, as it's their bestselling magazine (including nationals like People or Vanity Fair). If you're not near Denver, you'll probably never see it, but I'll start posting outtakes in a few days, once I get my story in.

Blogging story hits tomorrow

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 17:09:59 GMT

Just talked to my 5280 editor.

The issue with my piece on Denver-area bloggers hits the newstands tomorrow.

I haven't seen the final version, so hopefully most of the people I spoke to are still in there. I went way over my assigned word-count trying to include you all, so one or two may have been cut. It's only 600-1000 words, but should be prominently featured in the opening section, Atmosphere. I'll let you know more when I get my copy.

I hope to include some outtakes from the interviews here as well. I got such great material and could only include a whisper of it, so I'd love to share more great thoughts from blogging, particularly from Jeralyn of TalkLeft, Stephen of VodkaPundit, Andy of WorldWideRant and Walter of WalterInDenver. All that may have to wait till I get my current story in, but the issue will be on newsstands for two months.

(FYI: 5280 is Denver's city magazine. This is the mile high city, because supposedly the altitude is exactly one mile, 5280 feet high. I linked to their website above, though they don't have a whole lot on it.)

Blogs make front page of Boston Globe

Wed, 23 Jul 2003 15:38:02 GMT

From page one of today's Boston Globe:

'Blogs' shake the political discourse

Not the greatest story ever told, but it's mildly compelling, and it's lengthy, and it's on the front page of a major U.S. media institution. I think that's the most interesting thing about it: that blogs are getting more and more major coverage in the major press

And of course they focus heavily on Dr. Dean, since his bloggers have been making things happen:

Dean is famously ahead of the pack, with an official blog (blogforamerica.com) plus dozens of unofficial sites dedicated to his candidacy. His campaign has even hired some well-known bloggers as technical advisers.

And I think the piece hits on a key reason blogs are popular with political junkies, even those focused on a particular candidate:

Many bloggers believe that their role is to supply fresh ideas, something official campaign websites don't, in a voice that tends to be more entertaining. Official websites can be boring, said Charles Donefer, 21, a recent college graduate from Washington, D.C., who helps with the Dean Nation blog. ''Everything's been vetted through 20 different people. Nothing written by committee is good to read.''

And one more interesting idea, from the campaign POV:

Of course, bloggers are also free to criticize their candidate, questioning decisions and debating every move -- usually without internal information. For someone accustomed to top-down, hierarchical campaigns, it can sometimes be hard to watch, said Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi. But tell a blogger what to do, he said, and ''it just suffocates the entire thing.'' ''You've got to be willing to let go,'' Trippi said. ''You've got to just close your eyes and let them do it.''

The Dean campaign is also excitedly reporting that they've surged to #19 on Daypop's listing of the most popular blogs on the net. For comparison, they cite The Drudge Report at #6, Andrew Sullivan at #10 and Michael Moore at #67.

And I'd like to point out that two of my own new friends and local bloggers made the top 100. TalkLeft is at #46 and VodkaPundit at #80. Both great reads. I link to both of them. (And more importantly, they to me!)

Dean winning big among Salon bloggers

Sun, 20 Jul 2003 21:12:05 GMT

Now here's an interesting poll. Robert has hit on a great idea, at least to Salonistas like me: a poll of who Salon bloggers are backing for president. He apparently went to considerable effort to track down the hundred highest-ranked Salon blogs, plus every other he saw popping up, for a total of 145, and about half responded.

Results are in today. Highlights:

Dean trounced the rest of the eight Democratic candidates with 29 votes, or 40.3 percent.

In second place was Kerry, whose 14 votes gave him 19.4 percent. Dennis Kucinich came in at third place, with eight votes, or 11.1 percent.

“President” Bush got two votes, for 2.8 percent. Edwards got only one vote, for 1.4 percent.

The rest of the Democratic contenders -- Braun, Gephardt, Graham, Lieberman and Sharpton -- received no votes at all.

He's got lots more data, and more analysis, which is pretty interesting.

He's a big Kerry man at the moment, and I think his prediction that most of the undecideds will move to Kerry's camp is wildly wishful thinking. But see what he has to say and decide for yourself. And I bet he'll poll again and we'll find out. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it here. (Though if Dean shoots himself in the foot and a shift to Kerry mirrors a shift in the wider electorate, I'll note that too. That's the only way I see that scenario playing out.)

(And by the way, I was planning to link to his results regardless of whether my fave Dean won or lost. I was just happy he did so well.)

Guest blogging

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 03:43:43 GMT

This guest blogging thing really seems to be catching on. Seemed like a curious concept when I first heard, but it does seem like a win-win-win. The blogger keeps some of his audience from drifting, the guest gets exposed to a new audience, and the audience gets some fresh material they may or may not like while the blogger is away--and possibly the chance to discover someone new.

So this is an interesting twist. Howard Dean will be guest blogging all week for Lawrence Lessig, while he vacations. Seems to be the first incidence of a pres candidate guest-blogging. (Which is a quick trick, since there have been very few examples of a candidate blogging period--including Dean, really; very little of the man actually on his blog. Gary Hart tried it--barely for seven weeks during his exploratory campaign, then promplty dropped it but returned a few weeks ago at a once-a-week rate. His output was only slightly higher in the spring. I guess that's a blog. Sort of.)

Dean on Lessig starts tomorrow (Monday). Could be interesting. Or not. Let's hope it generates something.

Coding credit

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 02:40:27 GMT

I've been delinquint in crediting the person who saved my blog technically. It was spitting out thousands of errors to Mac users and some others, and Mike Ditto overhauled the code for me. Also showed me how to do several other things, so I'm much less likely to continue screwing it up in the future. His blog is here. And you can always find it and several other local bloggers in the left column, under the "Eight Great Denver Blogs" heading--which now includes eleven.

Please don't hesitate to email me if anything looks screwy in the future (or now). I won't be insulted, I just want to know what's broken. I have no idea what some of you on other platforms are seeing.