I asked Dave Winer if he wanted to run for California Governor and he asked me what's the bloggers' platform?

There's an old Jewish principle of elevating simple things and behaviors through attention. Make washing your hands before meals a spiritual cleansing by holding certain ideas in your mind, focused by a briefly uttered prayer. When weblogs are our voices, the blogosphere can be our vox populi.

The blogger platform: Elevate blogging from narrative to activism, from lifestyle to politics, from netizen to citizen.

Platform points:

1. A weblog for every elected official before the 2004 election.
• Improve transparency
• Conversation with constituencies more than lobbyists
• Improve the collective memory of our term-limited legislators
2. A weblog for every student and teacher by 2005. 
• Investing in our future workforce
• Assumes access in every classroom
• Better parental involvement 
3. A weblog for every Californian by 2006.
• Economic development in a knowledge, service, and collaboration economy 
• Shorten the time to create jobs and find work
4. Censor-free Internet access in every public library.
• Democracy needs freedom to read  
5. Enterprise blognets for state and local government.
• Government services turbocharged by collaboration and communication
• Government workers in more intimate communication with their customers

In short, participatory democracy between elections. The anti-recall alternative.    

I'm thinking small. What message would you like the Secretary of State to deliver to 20 million households?

The ebullient and inspiring Don Park puts the semantic back into the semantic web. Mark things up willy-nilly and make sense of them afterwards.

<vegetable>tomato</vegetable>

imho, this is closer to how people really think, to natural human behavior. Biomimicry. These days we have more technology to automatically tag our spewed text and weave the lexical analysis that makes sense of the tags.

Read Don's introduction to Emergent Markup Languages, the comment thread, and XML maestro Sean McGrath's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Manuals.

Charles Miller isn't afraid of AOL weblogs.

Things that might suffer the brunt of damage from a few million AOL weblogs coming online would be the services that try to treat all weblogs as being equal, rather than divided into niches of interest: services like weblogs.com, would likely be overwhelmed by the sheer volume, not to mention the continuing drift from the ascendancy of technical and current-events blogs towards the personal diary. Just compare, for example, the Daypop Top 40 with the LiveJournal Meme Tracker and you'll see what I mean.

Susan Mernit, an AOL alum:

To me, Charles is spot on with this description of how blogging works and how AOL Journals may -- or may not -- affect the blogosphere.

One potentially apt comparison is between AOL Journal and the About.com guide sites--On one hand, Guide sites have not affected the web, because they are amazingly disaggregated and decentralized, vary widely in quality and size of audience they attract and have no overall branding.

On the other hand, they have had measurable impact because Google search queries always surface a healthy percentage of Guide sides in response to questions, and that gives the sites an influence or weight that makes their model work.

AOL Journals may integrate into the Blogosphere in an analogous fashion--yet for the A list technology and bleeding edge bloggers, most of the AOL Blogs will live quite far down on the food chain. And yet, for AOlers in established AOL communities (I am thinking quilting,or military families, for example, or Elvis impersonators), those blogs could be significant thought leaders, information sources, and flash-points for discussion.

As the room fills up with large numbers of widely varied people, the blogosphere looks like the Internet. Everything about the blogosphere will trend to average, to the norm. The exception? If the rewards of blogging are correllated with some precondition, the trends will skew to favor or punish those characteristics.