The domain came in over the weekend: EastBayKerry.com. Strong resistance by getting the local committee to blog. "I've never blogged before" is common. It's a little scary before it becomes routine. It helps when I explain (a) nobody's reading us, (b) it's just writing, like email, and (c) it's OK to muck it up.

They are coming aboard. More folks are reading, commenting, and signing up to be authors, a hierarchy of comfort. For example, see today's The Dems best hope in '04, a fantastic analysis by Harold Lowe, running for Oakland's city council. He explains why pairing John Kerry with Clark or Gephardt to win MidWest swing vote states could tip the scales.

Right now we're communicating via phone calls, email, a Yahoo! Group, the blog, and frequent meetings. I'm overly optimistic about my SMS announcement service, but hope it will become useful as we continue to reach people who have cell phones but no email. Everything remains too hard, including TypePad. I put the blog together myself but I can't imagine non-IT people doing it.

Cam Barret, Clark's blogger in chief, is earning his pay. Beyond the official Clark blog, Cam's folks rolled out local web presence en masse. East Bay for Clark is a feature-rich generic site. Good strategy. Like the Kerry camp, they have to populate the local blogs, but that's manageable.

The local Kerry team is growing, more than doubling each month. But how fast can you activate and ramp up a political network proportional to the 2.4 million people in Alameda and Contra Costa counties? The California primary election is in 126 days (18 weeks). Not much time to organize.

The centralization challenge is non-trivial. Headquarters staffs in most of the campaigns want to control the message through a network of volunteer flacks. To date, only the Dean campaign has

Longer term, after the elections, what are the lessons of mass produced weblogs? What motivators worked best to attract newbies into using mailing lists and blogs? How fast can people learn the blogging mode: the observe, write, feedback loop? What accelerates that cognitive shift? What sustains blogging through a long campaign? How important is visual design to creating a sense of locality? of affiliation? What does political blogfodder look like? And how do we make all this work for the offline? For the mobile phone user?

[a klog apart]