Last night was WYSIWYG’s IMHO panel on politics and blogs. Anyone who’s thought about the topic for more than about ten minutes could predict the course of the discussion: anyone can publish, anyone can read, any editing is through a Darwinian process of competing “mindshare”, the potential hazards, and so forth.
There was a consensus that decentralized publishing would somehow invert the decision-making in a political campaign. This was exemplified by the Clark Network and a never-implemented DNC Convention blog network that would have allowed convention attendees to publish their own experience and ideas for the consumption of other attendees and, of course, the public.
This stands in stark contrast to the traditional set of campaign messages, which are centrally planned and “broadcast” to the unwashed hoi-palloi. The populist appeal is obvious, but what is the benefit? At first blush, it’s a decentralized message machine that would allow the most engaging or appealing ideas to float to the top — a marketplace of ideas. This is blogging as polling, where messages are wrought from social networks and the politicians are informed less by his own convictions (subsequently delivered top-down) than by the convictions of the raucus social network beneath them.
I'm the Chief Technology Strategist for the Red Hat US Public Sector group, an open source and free culture advocate, a picky drinker, an amateur aesthete, and a dog enthusiast.
