Here's the next-to-final draft of a commentary that ran on NPR's All Things Considered on Monday. You can listen to it here.

I'm double worried about electronic voting machines. First there's the problem that lots of people have noted with the new machines. Instead of marking a box with a pen, you touch the screen to put an electronic mark in an electronic box. Very convenient and results are tabulated instantly, but suppose there's a bug in the computer, or suppose someone hacks into them. How would we even know that the software is miscounting the votes?

The most talked-about solution is to have the electronic voting machines also produce a paper copy of your vote so you can compare it with what you touched on screen. The paper copies would be kept secure so they can be counted manually to verify the electronic results...which makes sense to me.

But even if all the technical issues are resolved, I'm not going to like voting with the new digital machines. I'm voting because I want to make a difference. A little difference, exactly one person's worth. So I want my vote to make a mark in the world. I want to make a thick X in smelly magic marker ink where there wasn't one before. I want to feel a lever click into place. I want to punch some chads. That's what making your mind up feels like. Touching a computer screen is a little too literally doing my "bit."

Of course I don't want Florida to happen again. No one does. And I'm enough of a combination news and computer junkie to want election results within 4 seconds of the polls closing. But I'd be willing to give that up if it meant I could savor my role as a citizen longer.

You know, I not only want to make a mark on paper, I want to wait in line at the polls. The line should be long, and not only because that means lots of us are voting. The inconvenience reminds us that voting is worth waiting for. Besides, the line puts in front of me and behind me people who disagree with me. Yet right or wrong, we all get to stand in the same line. No matter how much we disagree about the future direction of our country, everyone in line agrees on this: People who cut in line stink! That's the basis of civil society.

And it should be drizzling on election day. And a little cold. Hands in pockets cold, not glove cold. We should be dusting the outside off our coats and stamping it off our feet as we enter the polling place because, although voting is an indoor activity, we should be reminded of the reality of the world outside, especially as voting goes digital.

As you've undoubtedly heard, a Canadian judge has made, in a nutshell, all the right decisions about file sharing and copyright, and then added in a defense of customer privacy as well. David Akin of the Canada's Globe and Mail blogs about this here, but you should check his overall blog for updates.

I just posted a recording of Chapter 14 of Larry Lessig's Free Culture, as per AKMA's publishing-changing idea. Chapter 14 is 17MB, and it's filled with explosive P's (damn amateurs!), but it's up and it's free.

I started reading Steve Johnson's amazing new book, Mind Wide Open, to our son the other day. Reading to a kid flips reading - our paradigm of what you do when alone - into a social act. And it opens the book up in a new way. But reading into a microphone for public consumption is something else again. It's like taking the book out for a spin: You're always looking ahead for dangerous curves.

Some excellent presentations on the panel I'm on. But it's tough to be on a panel and blog at the same time, so please pardon my sketchiness...

Pam Meyer gives a fascinating talk on her research into online dating services: What men and women think the other sex is lying about (status, weight), how extremely weak the links are (few people have met their online friends in the real world, trust is low). She says that online social networks have low entry and exit costs; how can loyalty be increased?

Scott Heiferman of MeetUp.org talks about the relationship of online and real world groups. Surprisingly, nline communities were among the first to use MeetUp.

Michael Cornfield takes a hard-nosed look at what the Net is good for in political campaigns. He defines "good for" as contributing towards garnering 50% + 1 of the vote in an election. He downplays the importance of using the Net for community building (the hippie stuff I like). He suggests that the national parties put up wikis so we the people can make a virtual party platform, that the debates ought to accept online questions that we have voted for, and that we set up a mechanism for monitoring what topics are actually being talked about online.

I talk about how the growth of messy, ambiguous, tacit relationships is required for engagement in political campaigns.

Now we head into a series of 20-min presentations.

Mimi Ito gives a great talk on the social networks that spring up around mobile phones in Japan. It's a phenomenology of these networks, supporting the case the social software tools need to be simple so there's room for small factors to trigger great emergence. (In response to a question about getting better input devices for phones, she says in Japan you can get keypad inputs for your PC.)

Rael Dornfeast talks about how new mobile technology allows us to be present to others in a bewildering variety of ways. He plays on Linda Stone's phrase: Continuous (mobile) partial attention. Rael wants things like being notified when he's waiting in public when there's someone nearby who shares many of the same names in their address book. He says that we should consider not just writing for the Web. "You'r saying you're most social when you're sitting in front of your monitor." (Great talk.)

Shelley Farnham of Microsoft Research talks about the social goals of social software: To have meaningful relationships with friends. Research shows that we use technology primarily to interact with our friends, not strangers. Similarity and proximity are strong determinants of friendship. Proximity is a huge predictor of friendship. The number of people we send email to correlates with how involved we feel we are with our community. She talks about intricate ways the real and virtual worlds interact. She refers to a http://research.microsoft.com/scg/#projects>project she's working on.

After lunch, danah boyd leads off. She talks about how she has been trying to make sense of artificial social networks, including how they try to "configure their users." She uses Friendster as her example. Your home page is a representation of self. [I'd say it's a presentation of self.] Gay men and Burning Man participants really picked up on Friendster because they're "urban tribes" with shared interests and co-located. She says that half of Friendster lives in Asia. Each of these sub-populations create their own social norms. We create different facets of our selves for our different environments. Friendster gives you an environment for presenting a self not tied to specific task or context. E.g., a 26-year-old teacher signed up for Friendster as part of her Burning Man group. Nothing in her profile indicated she was a Burning Man person, but her friends had Burning Man-specific info in their profiles. Her students found her group of links and made assumptions about her own behavior.

[Sketchy, semi-random notes from an afternoon of 20-min presentations, with much much much backchannel chat]

Warren Sack gives his twenty minute presentation. Social computing addresses two questions: 1. How can the insights of social science be applied to design better software? 2. How can software be designed to address social problems? He talks about a software prototype that does a "translation map": "The Translation Map is a prototype system designed to facilitate collaborative translations and geographically-based messaging" (from the site).

Now Warren asks if software should be evaluated in terms of social capital? Are there private, public and social capital? Nah, it'd be better to think about this in terms of space. When you introduce a new technology, it redistributes the private, public and social space.

Q: (Clay) Danny O'Brien says that on the Net we have public and secret speech, but not private speech...

Paul Resnick talks about reputation systems: A system that aggregates and distributes info about what people have done in the past so people can make decisions about what to do in the future. He's done a study that has some preliminary results: A sense of uniqueness leads to more ratings, and people respond to challenges to create more ratings.

He talks about eBay. About 1 in 100 transactions gets a negative feedback. But we don't know if that reflects the actual rate of satisfaction. His lab studies show that reputation leads to more trust and trustworthiness, but long-term partners is even better. We know from eBay that having a positive reputation brings in about 8% more money, in his study. Reputations are useful when interacting with strangers, but aren't so important if you already know the person because your experience will trump what others say. Short histories create the best incentives but long term tell you the most about the person. (Paul's research confirms what we suspected.)

Susan Herring talks about "Weblog as Genre." Her group randomly sampled blogs from blo.gs They looked at the producers, purpose and structure of the blogs. They coded 44 features and quantified the results: Adult males produce blogs that are filters, while women and young people do more personal journals. 50% of blogs didn't have links to anyone else. The average blog had 6.5 links out. The blogosphere is densely interconnected: The average degrees of separation of the blogs in the sample was 3.8.

Jonathan Grudin talks on "IM and Blogs in Work Environments." IM he says will be the predominant form of information exchange in business. He says that IM is playing much of the role that email did in 1984. Business is hot on IM, he says, which is different from email 20 yrs ago. In one project, he interviewed 20 people in the Puget Sound. He found they're technically adept but don't now much about blogs. In another study, they looked at 400 early adopters of a new IM client at Microsoft. Managers and older users use it differently. Technophobia and switching costs are dropping. Socially, you can IM down but not up, which is maybe why the managers like it.

Steve Whittaker writes about "Designing for Informal Communication and Social Organization." How do we manage complex social orders? Animals like fixed roles. Apes like dominance orders. The social view says that there are two aspects to being human: Social representation and informal communication. But what is informal communication? His research, within one domain, shows that it takes place between two people, impromptu, and lasts about 2 mins. They looked at ContactMap and tried to build a complex social representation of who communicates with whom by analyzing email. People liked its graphical view of the social net. ContactMap worked better than email for some particular social tasks. But there are issues around scaling.

Wade Cunningham talks about wikis, which he pretty much invented. He says that if wikis and blogs had been invented first, maybe we wouldn't have had email. He says that wikis generally aren't trashed, so maybe people are good. Clay quotes Wattenberg and someone who said that the cost of trashing a wiki is higher than the cost of repairing it, so that's why they generally aren't trashed.

I'm at a small conference on social networks put on by Microsoft Research.

During the brief intros, I make a fool of myself early on, getting it over early. I say that social networks worry me because they are based on explicit declarations of relationship, and because they're putting valuable relationships behind proprietary walls. Well, it turns out that "social network" means something different to the academics; I meant "artificial social networks" like Friendster. Much of the room must have been puzzled.

Scott Heiferman of MeetUp gave the opening talk. Excellent, but I've blogged it a couple of times before.

Now a panel starts.

Ze Frank, who has an ultra amusing site (see The Alphabet, for example), is being arch and funny about social networks. "Where's the status on line? Where are the velvet ropes?"

Joi denies that social networking tools necessarily diminish social lives and/or spirits. Blogs, he says, is publishing, but IRC is "hanging out." Changes in presence are events, and people should be able to know about those events. Social software like Friendster filter this: Who do you want to know about your presence, and at what level of detail? Cellphones give you presence, location and mobility, none of which we've had in computers, and that makes a big difference.

Tim O'Reilly: We're in the early stages of building an operating system for the Internet as a platform. We need an architecture of participation. He's excited about Microsoft Wallop because it tries to find the existing implict data about relationships. We should be creating loose confederations that allow us to query distributed personal/social info (with the proper privacy and permissioning, of course). "We need to reinvent the user control of social networks using an end-to-end architecture..." [Right on!]

Clay's 10-minute talk is called "The subject of this talk is not explicit." He wants to talk about an early mistake social network software is making. Orkut made it one-click easy to make someone a friend. The number of friends went through the roof but the network no longer reflected reality. So, they added a second click: How much of a friend? I don't need this data; Orkut needs it to create a visible and formal model of the network. But how valuable is a formal model? There's nothing Orkut can extract from a photo of a face that's as interesting as what we get from it in an instant. The most important information is implicit.

So, Clay says, what led Orkut to make these wrong decisions? What is Orkut thinking? 1. It thinks that what people are doing when they think about social situations is a form of computation. This is like AI's mistake. 2. And Orkut also assumes that, when asked, people can express they rules explicitly...but that's false. [Loved the talk. These are topics I've been writing/thinking about, and Clay puts it all so well.]

Steve Johnson says his first two books argued against the idea that the Net consists of little echo chambers. Instead, think of it as a place in which strangers interact and new things emerge. Emergence refers to Jane Jacbob's view of cities. [I've been reading Death and Life...a fantastic book.] He's afraid that the new social networks are "neutering" these adventurous places. And now people — Joi, for example — are talking about the software social networks overlaying real places. He'd like to use Amazon's Search Inside facility to search inside his own library, or the libraries of people one or two degrees away. Then he talks against the echo chamber idea: The Net is an echo chamber compared to what, he asks incredulously? TV? Even if you just follow bloggers in your general universe of interests, you're still following links out to more diverse ideas than ever before. He points out that the criticism used to be that the Net was nothing but flame wars. Now the criticism is that it's echo chambers. But, he worries, we are creating these social network tools in order to decrease our contact with others. [Jeez, is he good!]

Q: So, is FOAF bad, Clay?

AKMA has had the best idea of the significant interval: Since Larry Lessig allows anyone to record the audio of his book, Free Culture, for non-commercial purposes, why don't a bunch of us each record a chapter?

Within a couple of days — before Amazon could get me my copy — almost all of it's been done. You can get the list of links on AKMA's site.

I just published the latest - and possibly last? - issue of my newsletter:

You know how Doc corrects people who talk about "consumers"? "As Jerry Michalski says," Doc objects, "consumers are gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash."

I feel the same way about the word "medium" when applied to the Net.

A medium's job is to deliver a message. It does its job well if that message is delivered intact. But that's not how media actually work because we are not passive containers. Rather, in the process of understanding something, we let it affect us. It shapes us, and we shape it. We absorb it into the context of our lives. The more completely we absorb it, the "wronger" we get it from the point of view of, say, the marketer who wants us to take it exactly as he put it.

This is never so true as with works of art and creativity, which is why it's in the artist's interest to lose creative (but not necessarily economic) control of her work quickly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, the idea that works are content moving through a medium has led us to think that appropriation and reuse is an insult to the artist, and possibly a violation of copyright, when it is in fact a sign that the work is working on us. We honor it by making it our own.

It's heartening that Google's motto, "Don't be evil," puts morality at the heart of Google's mission. It's a lot better guideline than "Ruthlessly enrich ourselves" or "Crimp the air supply of our competitors." I personally would like to see "Make the world better" become an explicit part of every company's charter, just as a reminder.

But, "Don't be evil" only poses as a principle. It's not a principle because it can't be applied to a situation. It can't be used to guide action. Does not demoting an anti-semitic site's rank constitute doing evil or not doing evil? Saying "Don't be evil" just doesn't help us decide.

A more dangerous — because more subtle — faux principle is the Libertarian one that says "The goernment that governs least governs best." It looks like it can be brought in to settle a discussion's hash. But it turns out to be totally unhelpful. Everyone agrees that governmental bloat is a bad thing. The real question is: What constitutes bloat and what constitutes "least"? When a Libertarian invokes the "Least Governement" principle to explain why she doesn't want the government to inspect children's toys, the response is: Yes, but is this a case of least-ness? After all, Libertarians aren't anarchists. They believe in some level of government regulation. As we argue about toy inspections or seat belt laws or inheritance taxes, we will have to argue the specifics of each case: Are these regulations necessary and desirable? The "Least Governement" principle doesn't help us at all. It is a faux principle.

At least Google's faux principle tells the company to be alert to the moral dimension, even though the principle can't help with the answers. And it's phrased so succinctly that it won't fool anyone into thinking that it could actually direct action; Google's expression seems to have a little distance, a little irony, a little self-awareness. That's good because, while it reminds us that businesses are moral entities, we shouldn't think that not doing evil is as easy as it sounds.

The Jewish Journal points out that a search for "Jew" at Google puts a site for Jew haters at the number one position.

It sure seems to me that's Google been gamed by anti-Semites. At least, I hope that's the explanation since the alternative is pretty grim.

I admit that this is a tough - and interesting - case, but I'd like to see Google move the site down since Google's aim is to provide us with good information. And, sure, I'd say the same thing if the first hit for "Catholic," "Black," "Arab," or "Mel Gibson" were hate sites. But, the Jewish Journal article reports that David Krane, Google's director of communications, says: 'Google merely reflects what is on the Web and does its best to algorithmically rank pages. Unless [a Web page] violates a country or local law, we don’t make any tweaks,' he said."

Andre Durand of PingID says that there are three tiers of ID:

Tier 1: Personal identity: Me. Myself. Possibly I.
Tier 2: Corporate identity: An ID issued to let me into their space
Tier 3: My marketing identity: The buckets companies sort us into for marketing purposes, e.g., a Platinum Frequent Flyer.

We have lots of IDs. "Identity inflation." Most of our identities are T2. Andre himself has over 100 identities. He's given up on keeping track. The trajectory isn't sustainable. Already we generally only have a few passwords. The idea behind federation is that identity in one domain should be transferable across domains. E.g., if I have an account at Company A and click through to Company B, my identity automatically gets transferred, with permission. I could have one place for my address book, I could make it my address authority and it would transfer data to other domains and apps.

There are three protocols: SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), Liberty Alliance, WS Federation (IBM and Microsoft).

Nikolaj Nyholm has a problem with federation. People here are thinking about a perfectly engineered, IT world. Federation is part of the equation but not the way it looks today. The way it stands, if federation were in place, if you put a new SMTP on the Net, it wouldn't be able to send email to anyone.

Dick (Panelist): The web of trust won't extend very far. It'll work if it's United talking to Hertz, but not more widely...

Eric Norlin: Liberty Alliance sits between authentication servers.

Dave Sifry: It's software we run on our sites that says that we trust, say, LinkedIn, etc. From a business perspective, it means that there's some subset of these companies that agree to trust one another's authentication systems and will use the same middleware to accomplish this.

Andre: Why can't I use the protocols to link to my social connections? We should be talking about this.

Nikolaj: I have no sense of "home" in the Liberty Alliance...

Ted: Nikolaj is right. The nerve Microsoft hit with Passport was: Who's going to control my ID?

Andre: Here's one possible outcome of federation. In large enterprises, they have created ways to handle the redundant ID's in multiple directories. They create a virtual directory. Now, if you add up all the account info with all the companies you interact with, that's your useful digital ID today. Suppose I had a dashboard running on my PC, like the enterprise's virtual directory. It's likely a p2p client will exist on my PC or cellphone that gives me control. I don't have to move all the information onto my own computer.

Doc (moderator): Do the protocols for enabling that exist today?

Andrew: Yes, I think they do. I'm describing an application layer on top of the protocols.

Steve Pelletier (Sun): The consumer vision is great, although it's early. But the world is full of ID systems that will never merge. You need something that enables all those identity repositories to be integrated if only for business reasons. And you need protocols to extend this to customers. That's what federation does: cross repositories and cross schemas.

Doc: I hate the word "consumer." I'm a customer.

AOL guy: Before we can do federated ID for social networks, the social networks have to figure out what their business model is.

Isabel Walcott (The Research Board): We've discussed ID federation with F100 companies. The way I see it, this is about access control. Companies haven't figured it out. If social networks could solve this problem, it could go into the corporations. There is no "god" at these big companies saying who can have access to this or that part of the DB. It happens on a peer-to-peer basis: Someone's boss says which field or part of the DB you have access to. How do you manage access control at the object level? It has to be in some sort of p2p fashion.

Someone: There are legacy solutions that won't be displaced. You have to layer on top of them, like PingID.

Jeremy: It's not just the pain of sign-on. It's also the pain of registering for a new service. A few cases: Company B allows customers of Company A to become registered customers, dynamically, moving my profile. The social networks could be a home base for relevant attributes about me. A federation of those in which my attributes could be relied upon by other online services would be appealing to me. I.e., I can dynamically become a cars.com user using my social network ID and profile. You could do that now with the existing standards.

Nikolaj: Today we have an ID where we can reach other: email. But it has no other attributes. You can't authenticate itself. Or, your credit card uniquely identifies you. You can even use it to exchange info through a proxy like PayPal. And that's what we're looking for.

Someone: Do we have a schema for the info that we think is useful? No, we don't. The metadata around my demographics and psychographics. Will people create a common tool across social networks so I have a single user experience?

Andre: Jeremy's comment may have uncovered a business model. If the social networks glommed onto these protocols and built a service for users that allowed them to store the info...

Brian Dear: How about FOAF?

Nikolaj: There's no layer of authentication.

Jeremy: It's an attribute.

Someone: We may not want to connect social networks. E.g., one's for business and the other is personal.

This idea that arose from a meeting at the Aspen Institute is apparently starting to take off. In this "birds of a feather" meeting, Lori Fena (Aspen Institute) says that the Accountable Net addresses problems like security and spam. The solution is to build accountability into the applications. E.g., an identity system and reputation system would let you know who's sending you a msg and what that person's reputation is. With regard to security, if there were identity and reputation attached to a packet, you could decide which packets to trust. [Ack! Scary!] It has to come with transparency and user choice as well. Communities can make their own rules. (The other forum leader, Tara Lemmey (Markle Foundation) talks about a federal security project.)

Government agencies don't trust other government agencies, someone says. The CIA wants to be sure that the data it shares with another agency is treated with the same level of security.

Q: What does an "authenticated user" mean? It seems to imply that a user only has one identity. Digital certificates never took off because you couldn't link them to other attributes of the person such as bank account.

A: (Jon Callas) There are identities, not identity. I have at least four as I sit here: the PGP employee, the home-owner, etc. Authenticated means authenticated to another agency.

A: (Tara) You have soft identifiers like name and social security number. You have hard identifiers like biometrics. You have your wake, which is all the place you've been. And you have your creative output. All of these are part of identity.

Q: How can this be kept ahead of the people who would develope evil tools (evil from a privacy point of view)?

[Lori cites John Walker's Digital Imprimatur]

Q: (Me) Where can I find out more about this proposal that scares the daylights out of me? I don't want to talk about it here because that's not the point of this meeting.

A: There may be regional forums.

Someone in the group says that we're moving to a decentralized system where everyone gets to make his own decision. [But what will happen in a world in which large interests can make demands of us?]

Q: (Keith Teare) We're moving into an assumption of distrust. We shouldn't. I prefer to assume good and deal with evil rather than building big systems to prevent evil.

A: (John Patrick) Maybe working with academia would be a good way to bridge the theoretical and the practical. Maybe we should break it down into bite-sized prototypes.

Lori: Almost a research agenda that breaks it down into the key ideas.

Tara: We are already building an alpha for the national security components.

John Patrick: Authentication would be a real good place to start.

Elliot Noss (Tucows) says we could focus on the large mail server folks and get a win there.

Jon Callas: SPF [Sender Policy Framework] is an accountability system because it says that if mail came from this set of servers, it's from me, and if it didn't it's not.

Someone: Accountable for what? What are you doing to define that? Are you putting together a priority list of what are the behaviors that our society is defining as unacceptable on the Net?

Lori: It's accountable to one another within groups and applications. We don't want to be the central authority. We want to move our principles for rule-making and enforcement; we don't want to say that you should make the following rules.

Someone: In a perfect world, we'd all have perfect authentication, identity, etc. [Not in my perfect world.] Can't be done centrally. It should be driven to the edges.

Bob: The free market won't do this. Databases didn't talk with one another until the federal government said it wouldn't buy your DB unless it supported the spec. [More terrifying. It should be decentralized but accomplished through government intervention?]

Michael Miller: What about in societies where you can't express yourself?

Lori: Maybe we should have checklists for people designing applications. E.g., "Have you thought about how your product can maintain anonymity in societies where there isn't free speech?"

Tara: Many of these systems are being designed for or by the government. They will be influential.

[I remain nervous about this initiative. The intentions are good, of course; two of its leaders are former heads of the EFF, a great credential. Esther is enthusiastic about it. Damn fine reputation system. But I have deep doubts about how well its voluntary nature will be maintained. The large entities that are highly motivated to support it — government, corporations — will require that we participate. We won't be able to say no without walling ourselves off from much of the Net. Social networks, not social fences! On the other hand, this meeting assumed we already know what the Accountable Net is, which I don't. I can't even tell if it's a lobbying effort or an attempt to come up with standards/protocols. So I am, once again, speaking out my ass. I am undoubtedly wrong about it and look forward to understanding it.]

From the Daily Mislead. I cannot warrantee its accuracy.

BUSH ALLOWS GAYS TO BE FIRED FOR BEING GAY

Despite President Bush's pledge that homosexuals "ought to have the same rights" (1) as all other people, his Administration this week ruled that homosexuals can now be fired from the federal workforce because of their sexual orientation.

More at Loose Democracy

ESRI is the leader in GIS systems. Their stuff takes geographic data and manipulates it. First, it creates electronic maps to look at (and zoom in on, put various layers onto, etc.). But, that's just one thing that a GIS system can do with geographic data. I covered ESRI for the issue of Esther's Release 1.0 I wrote a couple of months ago, and I was very impressed not only with their technology but with their public mindedness. I'm also convinced that GIS is going to be big news over the next 2 years.

Geography and GIS provide a framework for language and knowledge, Jack says. GIS is an enterprise system that organizes workflows. Geography is essential to colalboration.

He shows a very cool animation, flying in to Honolulu from space, and then distinguishing it from a virtual reality app by toggling on shading that shows cell phone coverage. Then he flies into Greece and then to Everest. Too cool. [What a way to explore the world! It's the atlas I want!]

I shared a cab ride to PC Forum with Adam Berrey of OnFolio, and then yesterday I got a demo. It looks very useful. It lets you save and organizes ages and snippets of pages.

You know how many bookmarks I have on my bookmarks list? About five. I can't tell you why, but I just don't find it an hospitable environment for saving pages and scraps. OnFolio looks like it might do it. The foldering is easy, it saves bunches of metadata, and it wraps entire pages into .mhs files that contain all the images. It also looks like it'll make it easy to share folders, although I personally don't have much interest in that.

Hank Barry (former CEO of Napster) moderates. He cites a Pew study that says 44% of Net users say they've contributed something to the Net. 140M camera phones in 2004. 115 photo-sharing services. DeviantArt has 4M works of art posted. And there's growing resistance to ISP offerings that restrict uploading.

Shane Robison (HP [Home of computers armed with DRM to lock you out]) says that his customers want to produce their own content.

Rob Glaser (RealNetworks [Talk about your bad defaults! Real is close to deceptive when it walks you through its install program]) points out that not everyone wants to create their own music, although they do want to post their photos. And they want to package up playlists, etc.

Lisa Gansky (Kodak's O-Photo) says 0-Photo has a billion images, a third of which are printed. [Yikes!] The demographic skews to women. George Eastman realized that he had to market to women. When digital cameras first came in, the men bought them and downloaded the image, holding them hostage on their hard disks. O-Photo eases the sharing. The "soccer moms" tend to print more than the younger demographic. Kodak Mobile is a subscription service for cellphone cameras. That gives us a sort of "streaming intimacy."

Q: Why can't I get my IPaq and IPod to work together?

A: (Rob) Because Steve Jobs, for reasons known only to him, won't license the FairPlay DRM manager that IPod uses. Either of two things will happen: Apple will return to its historic single-digit share, or the market will be slowed because they'll say, "What, I bought an IPod and I can only shop in one store?? What is this, the Soviet Union?" (Applause.)

Shane: We're working with Apple on this. It'll get straightened out.

Q: [Steven Levy] Now we have tools that give people quasi-professional ways to create media. Are we going to make media for one another, or is it more of an American Idol sort of thing where people make media in order to filter up?

(Rob): Those aren't mutually exclusive.

Q: This revolution has been around the corner for years. But there's a way to push it forward. There will be an explosion in grassroots video when people can be seen by others on the TVs in living rooms.

Shane: When everyone has access to broadband, the TV can become an interface.

Rob: It has to do with the shortage of narrative-form story-telling skills. There's a dearth of creative talent. [How do we know that?]

Shane: We have to make big content owners comfortable with using our environment. We're making progress. There's a fine line between giving them the kind of protection they need to distribute their property and giving consumers they need. You'll see some announcements soon showing we're making progress with the content companies. [Be afraid.]

Eric does research on the behavior of shoppers and browsers.

Defaults matter (he says) because people like to be able to make choices, but they don't want to have to make choices. E.g., if the form for new employees that lets them opt into a 401K plan starts out with 3%, lots of people will take that "choice." E.g., XP defaults to having firewalls off. The biggest change they could make would be to pre-check the box on the form where you make the settings.

People are very loyal. The average time people spend on Amazon decreases on repeat visits. That's because we get better at navigating Amazon. This locks us in. And in travel, most people book at the first place they look.

He shows data that if you use clouds as the background of your web site, people are willing to spend 15% more for furniture. [Damn lizard brain!]

Remember, he says, that we're very different from our customers. The customer wants appropriate defaults; "defaults are the most important you can make" to shape behavior. The customer wants to minimize search. And the customer wants to pay in ways that minimize psychological cost — that is, paying $20 for product and shipping together is different than paying $15 for the product and then paying an added $5 for shipping.

Q: How do we go from $0 to $0.01, which you've said is the biggest hurdle?

A: Have them pay for added services.

Q: How about subscription prices?

I'm in MetaCarta's break-out session. CEO John Frank is presenting. MetaCarta finds all the references to places in large bodies of documents and then enables users to find all the documents that refer to a particular place.

Steven Johnson gives a great talk on the topic of his book, Mind Wide Open. [I wish I could write like Steve. Total author envy.]

First he recounts the result of his own brain scans: When he was floundering, trying to come up with an idea, much of his brain lit up. When he was focused, the amount of brain activity went down. "People say that it's a shame that we only use 10% of our brains. But that's like saying that in many words, Shakespeare only uses 10% of the alphabet...how much better it would be if he used all the letters in every word."

He says that dopamine causes the brain to explore its environment it has been disappointed in an expectation. Fascinating.

He ties this then to why video games are addictive. Video games have a clear reward structure, and frequently the reward is the desire to explore new areas ("I just need to play another 4 hours to unlock the next level of Myst!"). [Hmm, now that I think of it, shouldn't the desire to explore new territory be tied to the failure to get a reward?]

Q: Are you now a determinist?

A: It's important not to have discussions of the brain's physiology get turned into determinism. We're a mix of culture and genetics. The brain evolved to capture the idiosyncracies of an individual life.

Q: [Cory Doctorow] How can we neuro-amateurs distinguish crap from non-crap?

A: The Symphony in the Brain is a good book on the topic.

Q: [Neal Stephenson] Did the scan show any activity in your cerebellum.

A: No.

Q: Has this knowledge made you a better person?

A: Not really. You can recognize some patterns and that can be helpful.

Q: Who's winning, the reductionists or the emergence-ists?

Each of the innovative companies presenting this afternoon has 30 seconds to tell us why we should come visit them:

Convoq - the power of web conferencing delivered onto your desktop

Informative - Identify "influentials" to expand your brand.

Intelligent Results - Make meaning out of telephone reports

Language Weaver - Statistical machine translation

MetaCarta - Find all the documents about a place

Mind Fabric - Natural Language Processing to listen to what customers are saying

N8 Systems - Helping IT and businesspeople understand one another

Scalix - "Delivering on the future of email"

Bruce Schneier (Counterpane Internet Security) says security is primarily social. The techno solutions don't work if the social environment doesn't support them. Much of the stuff being done in Homeland Security isn't worth the cost; cost isn't considered.

Robert Liscouski from Dept of Homeland Security says that they do consider cost.

Bruce: Wrong economic model. It's not the cost of loss. Take Iraq. It cost us $200B to invade and occupy Iraq. Doing it was good, but was that the best use of the money? Did we get our $200B's worth?

David Johnson of NY Law School, explains the Accountable Net proposal that came out of a meeting at the Aspen Institute. It would let you know that you're dealing with an authenticated person and enable trust networks while staying decentralized. Here's Esther's description from her NY Times column on the topic:

The idea is simple: People on the Internet should be accountable to one another, and they are free to decide whom to interact with. The goal is not a free-for-all, anarchic Net, but one where good behavior is fostered effectively — and locally...

The basic rule is transparency: You need to know whom you are dealing with, or be able to take proper measures to protect yourself. The accountable Net is a complex system of interacting parts, where users answer not just to some central authority, but to the people and organizations whom they affect.

John Palfrey puts it this way:

We think the internet will become more orderly over time, but we do not agree that the internet needs, or will easily yield to, more centralized authority — private or public. To the contrary, we believe a new kind of online social order will emerge as the result of new technologies that enable a more powerful form of decentralized decision-making. These technologies will give private actors greater control over their digital connections. They will enable both end users and access providers to establish connections based on trust, rather than connecting by default to every other network node and trying to filter out harmful messages after the connection has been made. Because of these new developments, participants on the internet will be more accountable to one another than they have been in the past.

...As long as ISPs, enterprises, and individuals use systems that require those who interact with them to authenticate themselves and/or provide acceptable reputational credentials — using a contextually-appropriate mode of authentication — then everyone can decide when to trust someone (some source of bits) and when to filter someone else out of their online world

[sketchy notes]

Eric Schmidt is being interviewed. He says that Google has lots of ways to get better. He points to two. First, Google doesn't always put the right link in the first slot. Second, there's what others — not Eric — call the "deep Web."

Orkut is part of their strategy to learn how to collect information [from the social networks], as well as building their ours. The privacy issues will only get worse. For example, Google is getting sued by people for making available public documents that show they were convicted of crimes. But when push comes to shove, the company's policy is "Don't be evil." He says people generallly agree about what is evil. [Say wha'? Could the opposite be any clearer? The fact that it doesn't seem that way to Google is an artifact of their homogeneity. Which also means that they just haven't happened to hit an issue that rends that homogeneity. I hope they have a set of back-up policies stored in a "In case of ambiguity break glass" container.]

Dan Rosensweig of Yahoo (265M users) says that social networks can help people synthesize information and create an affinity group of people who may have never met but who can share knowledge and make searches more precise.

Jon Miller says that AOL traps about 3B spams a day. Esther suggests that the user should pay the ISP: you get, say, 100 free emails a month. Yahoo says spammers would still find it worthwhile. Eric suggests that we'll have public and unlisted emails.

Q: Thanks for Google News. And will you do Google for the home?

Eric: Google News has had an ever bigger effect outside the US. And we've done some work on Google for the home, but we haven't solved that problem.

Q: [Tim O'Reilly] I tend to think technology advances through hacks. Social networks are currently bad hacks that tell me we really need to add P2P protocols to address books so you can visualize your real social network instead of building a faux social network.

Eric: It'd have to be connected to some sort of server to manage all the different devices you're using. The current social networks are simply trees of information that computers could construct on their own if we simply gave them permission. It's more a permissions issue. The current SN's will probably evolve into being more than simply introduction services.

Esther: The problem is "friend inflation." And, also, these SN's require you to make social relationships explicit. [Right on.]

Tim O'Reilly (one of my heroes) leads a panel on "the reality of Internet and politics."

The panelists are Jonah Seiger who worked with EFF, Bob Epstein of GetActive.com, and Scott Heiferman of Meetup.com. It takes Esther asking a question from the floor to get them to address what I think is the fundamental issue: Ordinary people feeling they can own a campaign.

Eventually, I asked if they each could find even a single sentence about how the Net is making a difference to politics, without using the word "money." Scott did, but the others two couldn't. "The Net lets us do old things in new ways," one concluded.

Here's a list of people blogging the conference:

I shared a ride from the airport and happened to sit with two guys doing really interesting things. Let me tell you about one of them...

Tom Barrett has done a deal with Palau (pop. 16,000) to offer the .pw top-level domain. He's got a 50-year exclusive contract, with revenue sharing for the Palauians. And he's doing something interesting with it.

You can register a domain name at .pw...sort of. Your ISP might offer you "joe@smith.pw," if your name were Joe Smith. But if you were then to go to www.smith.pw, you wouldn't go straight to your home page. You'd go to a directory of smith.pw sites. There you would find a link to your Joe Smith site, but also to the Sarah Smith, University of Smith, and Town of Smith sites, if they too had registered for .pw sites. This moves the naming problem up one level of abstraction: There can be millions of jones.pw sites, but to get a particular one, you have to go through the general jones.pw directory page, maintained by Tom's company.

I just arrived in Scottsdale and walked in late to the first session of PC Forum.

I was late because our America West plane sat on the ground for 3 hours as they diagnosed and fixed a faulty oil pump. Of course, things break and I don 't blame them for that. But the first 1.5 hours were spent on faxing the diagnostic procedures from Phoenix to Boston.

Faxing?????

I used to work at Interleaf. We had this problem solved in 1989.

Then, for the 9 hour flight (6 hours flying, 3 on the ground), we were rewarded with a thimble-size package of roast peanuts, but only if we clapped our hands together like trained seals.

All my life, I've been "David," except to my older sister who calls me "Dave" or "Davey."

If you call me "Dave," I won't correct you, although if you ask me my preference, I'll say "David" without hesitation. If you ask me why, I won't be able to give you a meaningful answer other than that my family called me "David."

Now, at age 53, I find I'm becoming a Dave. About half the time.

The explanation is, I think, simple...

The moderator is Jerry Kang from the UCLA LAw School, a visiting prof. at Harvard.

Kang: The FCC wants to maximize competition, diversity and localism. So, what do they do?

Horizontally, they decide how many TV stations a single firm can own in a local market. In 1996, the FCC decided that a single company could own two stations, with some restrictions. In the Sinclair case (2002), you can own more than 2 if it's one of 18 big markets. Similarly for radio. Nationally, in 1996, the cap on how many stations a single company can own was enlarged. Recently, the FCC reset it to 45%, Congress tried to keep it at 35%, but Fox and Viacom benefitted from the current bump up to 39%.

Vertically, there have been complicated rules about whether a single company can own both TV and radio stations, and more rules about owning a newspaper. Now the FCC has a "diversity index," weighting ownership of TV, radio, newspapers, etc. At the end of the day, they said that there are three types of markets: at risk, small to medium, large ones. In large market, there are no cross-market media ownership limits. In small ones, the old bars are in effect: a TV station can't buy a radio station, etc. The medium size ones has mixed rules.

Mark Cooper (Dir of Research, Consumer Federation of America) says that the diversity index is dead in the courts. There has been very significant media consolidation. There's a grassroots rebellion on media ownership because the FCC has taken a very narrow view of the First Amendment, what with its talk of views of "equal value." [Sorry, but he's talking quickly and I'm lacking many of the concepts needed to grasp this fully. Durn lawyers :-)]

Ben Compaine (MIT's Program on Internet and Telecoms Convergence) says that there's more competition and options on TV than ever. 30% of America used to watch Marcus Welby on ABC. Now, if you add together all the Disney channels, including ABC, Disney gets only about 12%. Further, the government's tinkering trying to create diversity actually decreased diversity, and when the rules were withdrawn, we got more diversity. Don't focus on what people choose to watch but on how many choices they have. [I.e., if everyone watches the same crap, so long as there's lots of other crap on, the system works.]

Adam Clayton Powell III (USC Annenberg School of Journalism) says that there are more choices than ever: Internet radio, XM and Sirius, towns the size of Albany with two 24-hour news stations... "One person's concentration is another person's favorite program." NPR now has 2 or 3 stations in many towns but no one talks about too much concentration about NPR. The new liberal talk network is paying Black and Hispanic stations to dump their programming, yet no one talks about concentration.

Cheryl Leanza is Deputy Director, Media Access Project, a non-profit law firm promoting the public's right to hear and be heard on electronic media. She says we protect speech rights not so people can speak to themselves but so we can talk in public. The best way to preserve diversity is to separate content from distribution because then the distribution people couldn't stop people from speaking.

David Oxenford (Shaw Pittman) is a lawyer for broadcasters. The real importance is on the rules governing consolidation at the local level. We have to look at this practically, not academically. What's the alternative to five companies owning 80% of the media outlets? When you go to Jackson, Miss., where there's only a $35M pot of money from advertisers, you can't operate a station if you have 1% share. You have to consolidate. The FCC has it backwards: it lets NYC stations consolidate because it's a huge market, but they won't let Jackson consolidate even though it needs it. Radio is a little different because it's cheaper. Besides, by the time we break up the ClearChannels, 85% of cellphones will be wifi enabled and thus able to pick up Internet radio.

Kang: Some questions/oppositions:

1. Broadcasters who want deregulation still want their "property rights" (spectrum) to stay regulated; they want the government to go after "radio pirates."

2. On the practical level, do you more fear the state or private sector's power over speech?

3. What counts as neutrality or intervention? Some who want deregulation of ownership still want regulation in content: obscenity, children's programming, v-chip, adult ratings, etc.

4. Is the argument over consolidation an empirical dispute? Or is it normative?

Overall: Must we deregulate to enable broadcasting to survive? And must we get the government out to allow freedom?

Cooper: Compaine only talked about our ability to watch, not to speak. And he talked about variety, not diversity. And, no, they won't go dark if they're not allowed to merge: No one has given back a broadcast liense. [Powell and Oxenford shake their heads. Kang says some radio stations have gone dark.] He wants to regulate the structure of ownership, not content. We want to avoid content regulation.

Compaine: People are upset that they can't get onto ABC News; they cry they don't have access. [Let 'em eat blogs!] You have to start with empirical numbers. First, if you have multiple news networks, there's a greater chance that more people will be heard. [Yeah, just like adding a second-place winner means more people have a chance to win the Megabucks lottery.] If you have lots of different outlets and proviers, you get more viewpoints. And we can't ignore the potential Dean found in the Net.

Kang: Ben Compaine, where are your normative commitments? What about possibly pathological cases such as the Dixie Chicks, MoveOn not being allowed to advertise, etc.? Do these things bother you?

Compaine: As long as you have choices, let them take the Dixie Chicks off and maybe someone else will pick them up because now they are worth less. The Chernillo [?] thing is good.

Oxenford: Empiricism has nothing to do with it. It has to do with political and economic power. How do you get freedom of speech in broadcast? Do you turn them into common carriers so that everyone gets to speak? But then who'd watch it.?Why should the government parcel it out?

Kang: It's already been parcelled out. How about cognitive radio? Give out spectrum and let people use it...

Oxenford: I think it's great. It means there's less and less need for the structural regulations.

Powell: Most interventions have unintended consequences. E.g., digital tv. The main thing to do is make sure that we all have open access to broadband.

Kang: Why aren't there unintended consquences for supporting the status quo?

Powell: Make no law...

Kang: So you're ok with hard-core porn on broadcast stations?

Powell: Yes.

Leanza: The status quo is not an open market.And when the Dixie Chicks are pulled off of ClearChannel, CC has an enormous share of the country western market, so in reality the local Top 40 station isn't going to pick them up.

Q: The first amendment is about willing speakers finding willing listeners. If people choose to listen to what you don't like, the first amendment is still working.

Compaine: Exactly. People wanted more networks, but they got Fox and they were horrified that it was "Married with Children," not opera.

Kang: You have to look at where preferences are formed. The media forms it, at least in part.

Me: Suppose the open and free market produced a total homogeneity of viewpoint, would you then favor some form of regulation?

Powell: That won't happen.

Compaine: That won't happen.

Leanza: Your unwillingness to address this as a thought experiment speaks volumes. [Thank you!]

Another day, another conference. Sigh.

This was supposed to be a debate, with Zack Exley (MoveOn.org) and a guy from RightMarch.com on one side [Sorry, I didn't get his name! Ack!] and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Daily Kos) and me on the other. Predictably, we all agreed that campaigns need both, although Kos and I did push the decentralization side harder.

We each gave a 5 minute intro, moderated by the natty Sidney Blumenthal of Salon and general media fame. Zack made an impressive, coherent case for the power of centralized control, while admitting that decentralized community-forming does have a role. But, to win the damn election, we need to be as disciplined as the Republicans, he says. I don't disagree with that, but I also see benefits to campaigns allowing and encouraging decentralized, bottom-up self-organization: It creates enthusiasm that then can lead to action. And, without it, campaigns tend to become top-down machines marketing a product or brand to us "consumers." I guess I ranted a bit about this during my five minutes. I was up to my demographic earlobes with all the talk of "consumers," "marketing campaigns," "branding," and, most of all, "messages." I told them that they were debasing our democracy. A highpoint of the campaign so far was when Kerry uttered five words off-mike because we got to hear his real voice.\ I want more off-mike comments! And, by the way, campaign blogging is off-mike, which is why it works and is important. We need to hear a human voice now and then. The lesson of the Dean campaign and of the Internet is (I said) that control kills scaling, and control kills voice. And that's why we need decentralization. We're about to begin 8 months of relentless, saturation advertising of the most offensive and stupid kind. It will to wear us down to nubbins of indifference. Only by connecting with others, in our own voices, will we find any passion or enthusiasm. Finally, I said, the campaigns ought to be thrilled when we take over their "messages," change the words to ours, apply them to our lives, go off in a thousand directions with them, because that's what it means to make an idea our own. By connecting with one another and by escaping from the controlled messages of the campaigns, we can make those campaigns ours. End o' rant.

Joe Trippi follows Ken Mehlman as we eat our bad desserts in the packed room. He says [notes, not transcript! As always.]:

I agree with Ken that the party that puts the resources into the new medium usually ends up dominating that medium. It's a little worrisome that we may have just awakened a sleeping giant.

I want to talk about something bigger than any campaign. The Net is a new medium that's different: it empowers the average American. TV doesn't. TV may have been the most powerful appliance in the American home, but the power was for the networks and the advertisers. The Internet is about to change everything. It's finally matured and come of age. It's the most powerful tool ever put in the hands of the American people. It allows them to make their own networks, let their own voices be heard. It's not top down but bottom up. The changes it will bring will be even bigger than the early visionaries suggested.

The naysayers are generally right for 10-15 years — people said no one would want sound in pictures, etc. The Net is maybe where Nixon was with the Checkers speech.

For the past 40 years, we have had broadcast politics. Politics has been about collecting big fat checks and putting ads on TV. The American people got left out. Retail politics becamse making sure you got to that guy who can write the $2,000, not talking with the voters. The Dean campaign set out to change that system, not just changing presidents. Hundreds of thousands of Americans contributing less than $100 put together $50M+, more money than any Democratic candidate has ever raised...that was because 100s of thousands of people used the Internet to communicate with each other. That's the main difference between broadcast politics and the new politics of people actually getting involved in their democracy again.

This change is going to come and it's going to be mind-blowing.

When TV came in, the visionaries said what was going to happen, but they couldn't conceive of what the changes would actually be. We needed millions of people to use Amazon, to use eBay. That got people used to the Internet. We needed MoveOn.org and MeetUp. That got people ready for DeanLink that let people find others in their zip code, create their own event. They did this without any command and control from the Dean campaign. It'd be a mistake to underestimate the bottom-up power of the Internet. There are a lot of people in the recording industry today who wished they hadn't underestimated Napster, etc. For Washington to believe it's immune that it's immune to the bottom-up power of the Internet is a huge mistake.

What was really different about our campaign?

We started with 7 people and 432 known supporters nationwide on Jan 31. I found out about MeetUp from a blogger, Jerome Armstrong. By the end of the campaign,l we had 190,000 Americans signed up to meet up on the first Wednesday of every month and then go out and work for Dean.

There's a misunderstanding about blogs. We decided to launch the first presidential campaign blog in history. It changed our campaign radically. [He tells the 50-posters anecdote and the red-bat anecdote.]

The real change in America will come from people using the Internet, using the tools we all build...

He mentions Dean's new org, DemocracyForAmerica.com, and his own, ChangeForAmerica.com

Q: Does this bottomup technology really play well for the Republicans?

A: We're at this weird moment, like the Nixon-Kennedy things. The Internet is just one tool among others now. Over time, it won't be a tool for the campaign. It'll be a tool for the American people. They'll organize themselves whether the politicians like it or not. It could be this year. An organization could come from the grassroots and totally take over one of these campaigns.

The most bizarre one was the Disney fight. Roy Disney has a guy on the phone who has a web site that talks to 1.5M Disney shareholders. You're starting to see these little hiccups that don't make a lot of sense on their own, but collectively it's pretty clear that bottom-up change is coming. Which part raises more money under $100? $1,000? Republicans. The one category the Democratic Party leads in is over $1M. The Internet just changed this. The Internet let people say We want to be involved in our government. The Dean campaign didn't make it, but the genie is out of the bottle. It's gonna happen.

Q: Would you advise Ralph Nader to be more respectful of the new medium? He said he doesn't have time to spend on line.

A: There are studies that say more and more people spend more time online than in front of their television sets. Over time, they'll become the same box. You cannot ignore this or just get in the bunker and pray that you're alive when it's over. The American people now have this tool. The Dean campaign was just the very first babystep of what's coming.

The political press by and large doesn't understand the Internet, and the Internet press doesn't understand politics.

Q: Will the Internet get out the vote in November?

A: Yes. The real debates over the issues is occurring on the Net.

Q: Are you seeing disruptive campaigns in other countries?

A: We tried everything, including SMS. It just didn't work; we had 5,000 people. Korea is an example of a government changed by the Net.

The lunchtime talk begins with Ken Mehlman, Bush-Cheney's campaign manager. He starts graciously by thanking the Dean campaign which taught us a lesson: "The power of the power of the Web and the power of technology means if you have an idea thats interesting, there's a viral way to get that message out." [Excellent! He only sees it as a way of moving messages around!]

He says the party first onto the a technology historically is the campaign that dominates it. The Web is not a substitute for the message. Technology is a way you communicate a candidate's message; it's not a substitute for the message. The Web is at bottom simply a way to accomplish the key aims of the campaign. He's focusing on: 1. Turning out the vote. 2. Using the Web to share the candidate's message.

Why the Web is important. First, we have moved from a world or country where people get mass information from a few sources. The wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The ability to have direct person-to-person contact is the way you cut through the clatter. And it's how you avoid the filter. And communication is increasingly participatory: just look at American Idol. The Web is the ultimate in participatory communication.

Here are the principles of the Bush-Cheney campaign:

First Principle: The Web is crucial to our campaign. Grassroots politics is important because the country is closely divided. And the ability to provide an information mix to people, including person-to-person, is important. We have 6M voters we email. [According to Zack Exley, these are bought lists of low value.] Our site uses MapQuest maps to direct people, online registration forms, etc.

Second Principle: We try to use our Web campaign to share the President's message and get around the filter. We have newsfeeds to 2,200 other sites so when George Bush says something, 2,200 sites say it also. We will direct you to talk radio shows and give you our suggestion for the topic you can talk about. Likewise for letters to the editor. A recent campaign generated 9,000 letters to the editor.

Third Principle: Our site is designed to empower individuals. On April 29, we'll be organizing 2,004 parties supporting George Bush. People can find the names of people in their area and organize parties in their neighborhood, can download the latest talking points...[Omigod is he shameless!]...all to help people share their [!] message with their neighbors.

Here's how the site can inspire people. BlogsForBush was independently created by supporters. Many-to-many. People talk about their support for the President and organize for the President. We didn't create it but I hope our web site is helpful.

Fourth Principle: Personalize. The ability to personally communicate is critically important to mobilize people involvement in grassroots and politics. A good example is Amazon.com. [Judging from his description, he seems not to actually use Amazon.] We encourage Web site visitors to tell us what issues they're interested in so we can proacticely email them information. And everyone who becomes a Bush Team Leader [Hey, that's me!] has their own page where they can track their activities, how many times have they calle talk radio, how many letters to the editor have they written...

Fifth Principle: The goal of a web site is to maintain a customer as much as it is to make a sale. A good Web campaign does not overly-solicit but instead engages individuals the way a good business would engage a customer, multiple contacts on multiple issues. We'll provide you with links, webchats, videos, rewards for encouraging. Customer maintenance is critical. So is customer recruitment. At every Bush event, people walk around signing up people's emails. We've been doing this since 1999.

Sixth Principle: Synergy. A good Web campaign provides a great synergy for whatever else you're doing. E.g., using the Web to launch ads that get print coverage. And they've used print to move people to the Web site.

The Republicans will be launching a Fact Log, or Flog, for fact checking the Dems asses. [He didn't put it quite like that.]

The Web is critically important. It can connect individuals' concerns with your candidate.

The most important reason we have had success is the strong leadership of our President. That's why our web has been successful. It's the cause that matters the most; the Web is just how we get there.

[I came late to this.] Influentials are more Republican and less Democratic than the general public, but less likely to be undecided.

The top concerns of the influentials are terrorism, foreign relations, but they are less interested in terrorism than the general public and more interested in foreign relations. Terrorism is trending up. The breakdown of the family is trending down. The only domestic issue trending up is health care.

Who are the online influentials? They did a a phone survey of 1,000 poeople and an online survey of 1,400 people. 7% of the phone surveyees counted as online political citizens (OPC) while 35% of those surveyed online were.

62% are male
59% have college degrees
42% have incomes over $75,000
36% are between 18-34
81% are white (compared to 86% in gen pop)
44% have never done any political work or contributed
49% are Democrats
29% are Republicans
46% have made a donation
24% have made a donation online

Compared to the general population, the OPCs are far more likely to have attended a meeting, written a politican, etc. The numbers franged from 2x to 8x.

Q: What's the relative importance of the media?

Guy from Slate: The blog community is real important here, extending stories indefinitely.

Cam Barrett, ex of Clarke, now consulting to Kerry, starts. At Clarke, he built an infrastructure for online community. Everyone got to have their own voice and point of view.

Gary Kebbel, News Director for AOL, says that only online news is growing. It's not just the medium. It's the audience. [We are not an audience!] That's why at AOL we've created an election site that hits all the audiences. We're most proud of our "SideShow" page, a partnership with Comedy Central, the Onion, Bill Mahr and others. He reads some cynical definitions from The Onion. It's got audio essays.

Vaughn Ververs is the editor of Hotline (a for-pay offering from The National Journal). He says some stuff about how he uses lots from the Internet but doesn't trust everything. E.g., he doesn't trust Drudge.

Stirling Newberry says that the Net is becoming mainstream. It's like TV in 1952: it can break stories but not drive the discussion. And pay attention to the rhythm of the news cycle. Push messages out from your center — your community.

Q: How do you find that influential center?

A: Technorati.com and other such sites.

Morra Aarons, moderator and director of Internet Communications, asks "Is it our message?" but the audience seems to think, yeah, it is our message.

Q: [Me] You're all using the language of broadcasting: consumers, audiences, messages. Is it possible that that vocabulary is getting in the way?

Stirling: Yes. Cam, what do you think?

Cam: Yes. At Clarke, we built a community.

Gary: What sort of terms could we use instead?

Me [snottily, sorry] The marketing vocaabulary comes from the industrial revolution and the military. We don't need a specialized vocabulary because we have ordinary language to talk about who we like talking with.

Stirling: We do have a technical vocabulary: "Flaming," for example.

Q: How do you pitch to an Internet news source?

Cam: Don't pitch. Let them come to you.

Q: How do they find you?

Cam: Google, industry news partners...

Gary: I use the word "community" instead of "blog" because communities are bigger things. Blogs are just another word for home pages.

Q: How do we create news?

Morra: Personally, I still believe in traditional PR.

Cam: One of the most successful ways to get it done is to have the community talking about your news.

Hotline: The traditional methods are still the best. Call the reporters.

I'm at the Politics Online Conference, put on by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. It seems to be te place to be. With 400+ paid attendees, it's the biggest conference the IPDI has put on.

The attendees ain't no Internet hippies. The guys dressed informally are the ones whose navy blue suits don't have pin stripes. Well, there is a Net brigade here, including Cameron Barrett, Mathew Gross, Joe Trippi, Dick Bell, Scott Heiferman, Joe Trippi. I've heard Zephyr is coming, too. (Yay!) [NOTE: Much of what follows is in the voice of the speakers.]

Phil Noble (PoliticsOnline) is the moderator: It's a revolution. Are you having fun? Even TV didn't change politics as much as the Internet will. We've come so far so quickly: It was in 2004 that the first home page for a candidate was created, for Diane Feinstein. Two years later, Bob Dole, "the most unwired white man in America," talked about his home page in a debate. Then Jesse Ventura, then John McCain. The digital revolution is here.

Panelists: Charles Buchwalter (Nielsen ratings), Ed Kellerr (RoperASW), Mathew Gross (Dean blogger), Scott Heiferman (MoveOn.org) and Jimmy Orr (Internet News Director, The White House...yes, that White House).

Charles Buchwalter (Nielsen Net Ratings). People use TV because it's what they've done. The Bush and KErry TV campaigns are the ultimate brand campaigns, trying to distill their brands into just afew words. [Which is why they're evil. Oh, wait, that's my conclusion.]

There's definitive evidence that online is going mainstream. Whether you're talking about seniors, or Hispanics, there are groups across the board going online.

Do online media offer unique opportunities to reach new voters? Yes. [He shows some slides of data, but there are props on the sage obscuring my view.] Web users seems to be about 15% more likely to be interested in politics than a typical American. Web users are less likely to say that TV is their main source of news. Web users also vote at much higher rates. Overall, in the US population: 28% are Dem, 32% are Republican, and 40% are independent; the Web population significantly skews Republican. Buchwalter suggests that this is because of the digital divide. The conservative sites are more homogeneously conservative; the liberal sites have more independent visitors.

He ends with a pitch for using Nielsen to figure out which sites to advertise on.

Ed Keller (RoberASW) is a co-author of The Influentials. Who are these influentials? [He uses the rhetoric of "conversation," maybe because the theme of the conference is "The Conversation is Changing" — Markets are conversations and so are elections...at least they should be.] "Decisions are conversations," he says. From 1977 through today, word of mouth has become the dominant factor in conversations. The Internet enables word of mouth. The influencers are 10% of the population. [Ed goes through his standard slides about the demographics of the influentials. I sort of stopped caring, for no particular reason.] The influentials are connected to groups. ["The Influentials" is starting to sound like a bad Harold Robbins novel. "Gig Young and Kim Novak are The Influentials...in Panorama!"]

Scott Heiferman (Meetup). Scott shows photos of recent MeetUps, starting with a Bush MeetUp in Florida. Scott dispells myths about MeetUp: It's not just Dean, it's not just young, it's not just for "decideds," it's not just bottom-up, it's not just about raising money to buy TV ads ("Cut out the middleman"). and the idea that people want to get together is not new. Scott holds up a placard from an event sponsor and says: "This is not good." It's from a company that sells video-enhanced banner ads. "This is not what it's about." [Go, Scott!]

Mathew Gross (Dean blogger). I love Ed's numbers because a year ago it was hard to convince people that the Web sphere matters. Blogs let you do communication and community. Simply having the tool won't change politics; it's how you use it and what you say. The Web is and will continue to be a written medium. Home pages may start to disappear in favor of weblogs. Weblogs won't succeed if it's just press releases posted in reverse chronological order. The challenge is to make the site engaging. We did that in part by engagingi n the conversation alaready going on in the blogosphere. People read blogs looking for a filter. And weblogs and commenting gives everyone the ability to interact with the campaign.

Scott Orr (Internet News Director for the White House) was advised by White House counsel not to show up.

Q: David Halberstam says that the Internet isn't as transformative as TV. It's good for outsiders coming in, but not a big deal otherwise.

Charles: Yes.

scott: The lines are blurry. Suppose a campaign promotes its MeetUp campaign via TV.

Keller: It's too early to tell.

Q: Mr. Keller, what are the age demographics of the influentials?

Keller: They're found in every age group. There are more boomer influentials because there are more boomers.

Q: [Micah Sifry] Charles, what makes someone count as a "net user"?

Charles: It's a wide spectrum.

Q: Ed, are you saying that influencers are the same whether you're talking about SUVs or voting. I've never seen anyone genericize influencers across all categories.

Keller: If you step back from the individual point of view, that's what we look at. [?]

Q: [Henry Copeland from BlogAds] What percentage of influentials are online political citizens?

Keller: 7% of the population are OPCs.

Henry: That means half the influentials are OPCs.

Q: The Dean campaign raised $22M. Why did the campaign spend so little on Internet stuff, and most of it on Iowa and NH TV ads?

Mathew: We invsted far more in the Internet than any other campaign in history. We're not at the point at which the Internet can solve all problems. When you're 4-6 weeks out from Iowa, it's TV. The online communities are tremendous because they help you put the resources on the grouhd or on the air. The Internet is more powerul, at this stage, at the initial stage of the compaign.

Scott: Because most online advertising doesn't work.

I'm at the DC Politics Online Conference, put on by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, where Markos Zuniga of the Daily Kos and I are supposed to be "debating" Zack Exley of MoveOn.org and someone from RightMarch.com on the topic: "One lesson from the Dean campaign is that centralization and control are the keys to using the Internet to win campaigns."