Dear Phil -
  Why should we conference in person when the virtual has been so enriched?

• The virtual's not that rich.
• The virtual's mainly broadcast.
• And you miss the interactions that occur during breaks, meals, pub crawls, and the other cracks in an official programme.

So I leave my computer, my home, my city, my country.

Recently, AD:TECH ("Eyeballs for sale! Fresh steaming eyeballs!") and PlaNetwork (Kumbaya embraces digital identity), both in San Francisco.

Coming up:

I'm going to try for the Bio 2004 conference exhibit hall, this week. Especially interested in new bioinformatics and the publications systems that try to promote innovation without giving away secrets. Innovation World's Michael Boland and Mary Kate Stimmler are blogging from the conference.

This week and next are full of East Bay Kerry stuff. A Democratic Party Meetup where East Bay Kerry recruits volunteers. Committee meetings for Fundraising, Chairs, Media Relations, Visibility and GOTV, and Writers. We're having our first Speaker Training & Kerry Teach-In. And a big bunch of us are going to the Oakland A's vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game to show Kerry love to all those Pennsylvanians watching the game. Gary Hart is signing his latest book. And we're sending envoys to other political meetings, like the Lamorinda Democratic Club and the MGO Dem Club. All the time compression of a startup, none of the cash flow, and hard deadlines.

I've started going to Mark Finnern's Future Salons. Smart people, challenging topics. Next one June 18th at SAP Palo Alto. Saw him at Planetwork, first time in daylight. You owe yourself a venue to talk about 10, 20, and 50 years out. Great context and fodder for work and life planning.

In two weeks I'll attend the first day of Supernova, blogging a technical and policy discussion of today's convergence. Time to bone up on spectrum allocation, grid computing, WiMax, and more. I'm glad the wiki (thank you, SocialText) and rss feed (thank you, TypePad) are up.  

I'm spending July 4th in Vienna, Austria, for BlogTalk 2.0, the conference by Thomas Burg and the Center for New Media at Danube University. Getting there a little early to spend time with the Actionable Sense Troupe ("How do you switch between Discussion and Action?") and BlogWalk 3.0 in beautiful Krems. 

Then to Bloomsbury Square for the first London Symposium on Social Tools For The Enterprise, 12 July. This scans like etiquette and finishing school. It's really about blogs, wikis, social networks, IM'ing, and the like. And turning them into workplace tools. Matt Mower of Evectors Software put it together. Stowe Boyd's there too. I'll have a week in London. Favourite pubs, bookstores, museums, clubs, bordellos? Blogger events?

Back in town for the BlogOn conference. Read Susan Mernit's post. They have a boot camp, similar to workshops I proposed for London. What do bloggers know that others don't? To understand social software, managers need the insights that make blogging and other social tools "click" for users, and to frame those "Aha! moments" into a useful context.

What should I do this fall?

Initiative. Voice. Democracy.

We got'em.

We're gonna use'em.

John Kerry's Media Corps is a new site on JK.com.

http://www.johnkerry.com/onlinehq/mediacorps/

From HQ to volunteers to the mediasphere.

Talking points.

Issues of the day.

Attacks recorded.

And the tools to put them to use.

We have five months
    to bring the message
        through the volunteers
            to the voters.

So let me tell you about the Rapid Response Model, how Kerry's Media Corps builds on it, and what makes this a beta release.

The John Kerry Media Corps

Embracing the decentralization message, volunteers put together the Dean Rapid Response Network in 2003. Last week John Kerry's staff launched the Media Corps, their first cut at rapid response.

Components:

• For each message (presumed weekly)
  • An assignment
  • A deadline
  • Background
  • Feedback email link
• Other tools
  • Research materials on the assignment
  • Recent television ads
  • Link to the D-Bunker (removed after the first week)
  • Tips for writers and callers

That's the anatomy. What's the whole?

1. Media Corps is a boundary communication channel. It pushes memes to volunteers. The campaign's politics and communications teams design messages. Media Corps throws them over the wall.
2. Media Corps is an end run past the political press corps. It tells volunteers to take the memes and run with them. To local media. To audience participation channels. To letter writing and other P2P channels. Can you spell disintermediation?
3. Media Corps is a memetic amplifier, making messages louder and reaching further. No longer are TV ads the only place you're likely to experience the campaign's message. The community reinforces broadcast memes with their own versions. This improves what advertisers call reach and penetration. 
4. Media Corps minimizes memetic drift, keeping volunteers on point. Its centralized and standardized seed message is the reference version. Unlike a game of "telephone" where messengers garble the message, Media Corps always gives a public point of origin.
5. Media Corps is a localization strategy, tailoring messages. Politics remains local. No national message works everywhere. Most advertising is wasted just trying to find its audience, let alone delivering the right message. Volunteers translate
6. Media Corps is a memetic biodiversity play, a lab for new ideas. Media Corps pushes its memes through thousands of channels, each reinventing the message. Some versions will spread further, survive longer, and have more impact than others. No single campaign office or market research firm can imagine or test all the variations the way the Media Corps can.

Why does it matter?

• Money. Every minute of "free media" is a minute more trusted than advertising. But the payoff is dollars that don't have to be raised.
• Message Innovation. Marketing sciences are all about developing the right sequence, timing, and presentation of the right messages for the right people. The right message is the hard part. Media Corps is a force multiplier for the communication team.  
• Measurable Results. Powering the feedback loop. Managerial gold. 

The Rapid Response Model

Most of the money in this election will be spent on television ads.

Every presidential campaign staff has a political director and a communications director. Typically a political director picks the ideas, issues, facts, and positions that will win voters to the candidate and money for the campaign. Then the communications staff wraps them up in events for the media to cover, things for voters to read, oratory for the candidate to propound, and all the other stuff that gets the word out. Advertising and branding, product management and media relations. Promotion.

Campaign communications are dynamic.

Hot items in the press change a campaign's message strategy hourly. For example, right now Rumsfeld is defending his performance in Iraq instead of attacking Kerry's war record. While a candidate's staff is small and agile enough to respond to attacks, it's not enough. Once leveled, an attack can fester in the air for weeks. And character attacks are best fought by anyone but the candidate.

That brings us to "rapid response."

Rapid Response has four parts:

1. Prepare
2. Detect
3. Respond
4. Feedback

Preparations include:

• Write, edit and test talking points
• Recruit a cadre of first responders
• List traditional media channels by locale
• Write procedures for responding to each channel/program/publication.
• Building training materials for effective response
• Set up a database of responders

Detection in three steps:

1. Notice an attack, through surveillance.
2. Report the attack to your rapid response network
3. Prioritize the attack.

The US has about 300 million citizens, about 106 million voted in the 2000 general election [US Census Bureau]. There are tens of thousands of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, mailing lists, and web sites. Two "free" strategies:

• Volunteers adopt a program/publication. "Mike will read the Business Section of the Miami Herald."
• Automated clipping services, like Google News Alerts.

Response. Every attack should be met with a swift and effective response. Prioritize only when you don't have the resources to respond everywhere. When you choose among multiple attacks, watch for the attacks which:

• are coordinated,
• reach a bigger audience,
• are authentic,
• are more potent, or
• open a new channel or issue.

Join fights:

• You can win.
• Where you can be seen or heard.
• Where you need to learn something from the engagement.

Response has three steps:

1. Assign. It doesn't make sense for everyone to respond to the same thing. Make sure your response team covers all the attacks worthy of response, and that people are matched to the assignment.
2. Draft. Every attack is a little different. So tailor your response.
3. Engage. Mail the letter, call the show, post to the bulletin board.

Feedback serves four goals:

• Risk assessment. Attacks going unchallenged? Attacks with disruptive potential?
• Message improvement. What's working? What isn't?
• Resource allocation. Where should we drive volunteer time and attention?
• Channel/medium profiling. What can we learn about media outlets to improve our effectiveness?

Prepare. Detect. Respond. Learn.

Challenges?

• Deeper-memes. Can you build a sequence of messages that assert an underlying value or point? For example, can "competence" and "character" be built in to how we talk about economy, environment, security?  
• Listen well to feedback. Listening doesn't scale, that's why we vote. And why we summarize. You need a combination of structured ("on a scale of 1 to 5...") and unstructured ("What did you say?") input.
• Positive Reinforcement. Bring volunteers back for new message cycles. Acknowledge people and teams for effort, creativity, and results.
• Experiment with the Process. This means consciously trying messages and talking points with different characteristics. How many words can fit in the bumpersticker version? What's the best day of the week to launch a campaign? Best time of day? Can we run two at once? Four at once? Does it have to be a whole week, or can we run one from start to finish in 48 hours? Test. Measure. Test again.
• Tailored Experiences. Support both high and low energy volunteers.
• Speed. Keep the cycles short. Look to IM and SMS for alerting to new threats.
• Memory. Help volunteers expose successes and failures to each other.
• Quick Help. Attacks aren't homogenous. In addition to research for this week's campaign, put response research for the 25 most common attacks, and 5 responses on each issue.
• Training. Build volunteer knowledge and skill. It's summer: recruit 50 high school teachers to craft tutorials on each issue, on each medium. Interview successful writers and callers for their story. Feed lessons learned back to the volunteers. 
• Attack. Initiate an issue. Seed the conversation. See how long it takes for big media to pick up a meme. See how long other groups take to respond, both friends and foes. Change the rhythm, put opponents off-balance.

Other metaphors I like...

California bans smoking in office buildings. People slip out for a smoke and huddle around the doors or the ashtrays in smoker exile. For those 5-15 minutes, your small group of fellow addicts shares the moment. Sometimes you break out in conversation. Usually casual, sometimes deep, occasionally the start of a labor union or a new product or a lawsuit. Despite yourselves, repetition of exposure fosters trust. And people take it from there.

Sometimes I think of blogging like amateur night at a comedy club. You step up on stage for your five minutes, probably at one in the morning, greeted by a random audience who laughs at you and maybe your painful story told in a funny way. You thank the audience, who were just barely awake anyway and who were never vested in your barely coherent ramblings, and you leave the stage. Until tomorrow. When you come back for more. And the next day you look at the world a little differently, noticing things that could be material for your set, and you rush home, write them down, and that night you try it out on a mostly different audience. And your material gets better, and you start to build a reputation, and you relax into the doing of it and start to pay attention to the two-way conversation that takes place between a performer and those cheering and jeering on the other side of the microphone. From utterance to rapport.

Company cafeterias or regular happy-hour spots are as much about being seen, and with whom, as it is about the conversations you have. Food? It's a heartbeat check, a status reinforcer, a clique definer. Depending on your role, it may not matter at all, or it may be everything. Presence is everything.

An automotive supply store (tires, I think) had a big sign by the street. Each night the owner put a new witticism, twisted proverb, or insightful comment on the sign. And commuters on Atlantic Ave chuckled or thought on the way to school or work each morning. 10 words or less, but those "posts" became a landmark amid the drab clutter of an interchangeable commercial district. Now in Oakland, California, about 500 miles away, the owners of the Grand Lake movie palace put one side of their historic marquis into the hands of their movie programmer. He writes strong messages about blackbox voting, the Patriot Act, a possible military draft, the Iraq war. Some people think he's an ass, others applaud, but everyone slows down to see it on the way to the market. In both cases, the author had no control over readership. A consistent voice, regular updating, and strong points of view defined both personal and corporate identities.

Dina, Ton, Peter, Gary, Scott, Drakaal, back to you.

Dan Gillmor wonders about blood lust as searches for the executed Nick Berg top the major search engines.

So you're asking, why does traffic slow down at a car accident, why do people crowd a murder scene, who pays for boxing matches and hockey games? That's one trigger.

Another. We've just fought a war where none of the violence was televised. We're hearing death announcements but no coffins, high school snaps, but no bodies. This video is unfiltered truth about the conflict, our conflict. Bloody, wretched, simple. 

And. We trust our federal government less than before. They admit to screening what we see, hiding "morale damaging" evidence from the general view. We trust our media less than before, wimps when we needed courage. So we scavenge for facts, for truth, for context and interpretation. For sense.

Click. Click. Click.

 

p.s. Almost no mention that Nick Berg is a Jew. He's not the first Jew executed on TV by Islamic terrorists after being captured working in a dangerous zone. Talk about derivative cinema.

Capping the number of users at 20, the new Movable Type 3.0 release pricing structures me out of its market. 

Enterprise blogging is a team sport. So are grassroots, educational, and community blogging.

And teams have personnel turnover. New people replacing departures, temps filling in. So the total number of user accounts grows over time. The average person changes jobs every four years, more frequently when you're younger; 25%-50% new faces a year, assuming you're not in a troubled economy, facing personnel problems, or coping with growth. Did I mention no more guest blogging?

I can no longer, in good conscience, recommend MT to small businesses, workplace teams, or any of the 1000 Kerry grassroots teams any more. They'll max out any of the five MT licenses in six months. Or minutes. My East Bay Kerry communications teams (writers, speakers, media relations, rich media) have more than 100 volunteers.  Repeat that for every county in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, etc.

I'd love for MT to offer a parallel pricing structure for non-governmental organizations, for unlimited numbers of users/blogs.

What are my alternatives? Scoop and its derivatives are looking better. So is Traction, which, while more expensive per user, doesn't cap the number of users on a server. More choices.

[aka strategy]

I received this email from Anne Collingwood this morning.

Phil,

I am frustrated about the lack of attention the Internet is being given by the national campaign.

I see the need, but I am clueless. I am interested in your thoughts about both the following questions and about how to improve the Kerry Internet Effort.

Best, Anne

I’m working in Ohio with a grassroots organization called Cleveland for Kerry. My friend Matt is working in California with East Bay for Kerry.

The following issues came up during a phone conversation we had tonight. Would you be able to help us think through the solutions?

1. Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized? How significantly can the power of the Internet diminish the need for television ads in this election? In 2008? In 2012?

2. Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others? Would you equate it to letters-to-the-editor in real time? Can there be actual debate online?

3. Are moderated discussions valid? Can a moderator censor some comments and still claim that they are listening to the people?

4. Did the Internet help facilitate the apparent cult of personality with the Dean folks? If so, was that kind of emotional investment wise; did it alienate folks not previously on the bandwagon?

5. Do bloggers feel betrayed if their advice is not used? Do they tend to extend trust to the candidate? How can a trustworthy candidate gain trust with new folks through use of the Internet?

6. What were the differences between young people attracted to Dean during the primary and attracted to Kerry during the primary?

7. The Internet offers campaigns the posting of data, mail, conversations, live broadcasts, tax revenue (just kidding :), and…?

There is no paid staff in Ohio. There is no staff that Matt knows of in the East Bay other than professional fundraisers. We see the Kerry Internet team working on live webcasts, fundraising drives, and the website. There are, however, "local websites" popping up all over the place, and we have no clue about what we can do with them.

If you don't have time to respond directly, we certainly understand. If you can refer us to someone or to websites, we'd appreciate it.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Anne Collingwood

What are your answers to these questions?

Scaramouche (1952, George Sidney) The Bride versus Johnny Mo fighting on the railing.

An influence across generations.

While I'm reading how memes diffuse through the blogosphere in hours and days.

I love the web.

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

• the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
• the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
• the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
• the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Out of the millions who blog, a handful do what professionals call journalism. Would more be better? Should we actively promote citizen journalism?

We could.

• Local Civic Journalism clubs.
• A full blown track in public school starting at age 8.
• An awards ceremony like the Pulitzer for best CJ reporting, best analysis, best thread, best catch of something missed by major media.
• Grants to develop curriculum for Business, Science, Public Affairs, Sports reportage.
• A professional guild helping CJers get press credentials and access like any news network.
• Legal services for bloggers to protect sources, file FOIAs, use sunshine ordinances, and defend IP.

And this is just for plain old text.

What will citizen journalism look like in 2009? My wild ass speculation: (like anyone will remember this post)

1. Moblogging comes into its own. Photos at a campaign stump speech by attendees outnumber those taken by photojournalists. And some aren't in bad light, of the back of someone's head, of the floor, with a finger over the lens, or from 10,000 feet away. Some will capture the spirit of an event and a defining moment. Long bet: By 2010 I'd be very surprised if ubiquity alone doesn't find us with a cell phone photo (or whatever we wind up calling them in 6 years) winding up above-the-fold on a major newspaper story, featured on the evening news, and gracing the cover of Time Magazine. A generation ago, big media adapted to electronic news gathering. The public continues that trend as the diffusing technology follows Moore's Law (more, better, faster, cheaper, smaller).  
2. Campaign coverage.
• A blogger on the presidential campaign bus.
• Designated bloggers at each meetup, taking photos and posting the minutes.
• Campaign aggregators, by location, topic, and affiliation go up 5 minutes after the home page.
• Local reporters become editors for local bloggers, compiling their accounts of the campaign.  
3. Personal video blogging becomes a staple of the portals and ISPs, a reason for customers to adopt broadband. And buy shiny tiny new digital video cams. Even laggards will have Logitech cams delivered with their just to be in on the conference call at work or to talk with family. First evidence: surging video camera aftermarket.  
4. Video syndication. We'll be moving more video en masse. RSS enclosures, anyone?.  As we're seeing in China's blocking of weblogs and other news sources, people route around censorship. P2P news distribution offers that alternative. Even for text news, P2P distribution of RSS and cached feeds let the network scale up.
5. News discovery systems, like Google News, will expand reach from the thousands of traditional news publishers to a broad selection of personal publishers. At first it's to weed out P.R. pros and to find reliable streams of general interest subject expertise. Eventually, they'll learn that the sixth-grade blogger has something meaningful to say about Outkast, worth sharing.
6. Blog juice. TV news and online editions of newspapers will explore ways to co-opt cheap content. Bloggers as stringers? Look for a play from the Classified Advertising department to annotate listings with fresh context from blogs, especially in smaller markets. Maybe even sharing revenue with popular bloggers. Example: citizen reportage on housing, neighborhoods put in with real estate listings.  
7. Stringer status. I'll bet hundreds of bloggers earn stringer accreditations from national news services and local news media. Not for everyone, but those willing to subscribe to journalism's standards will find this an edge.
8. Do you want it fast or good? Most blogging is about fast, slashing the distance between idea and paper. But video is inherently more interesting after post production. Home studio software adds polish. Voice overs, teleprompters, transitions, stock music, green screen backgrounds, titles. Nonlinear editing tools like Final Cut Pro will emerge in free/cheap format.
9. Extension. News isn't homogeneous, it's specific. Chess reporters have standard ways of representing game play. As do those who cover soccer/futbol. Or obituaries. Or police blotters. Or movie reviews. Watch for structural extensions to standard blogging, new blanks in the forms tailored to the application. And for clever ways to share new extensions.
10. History. Opposition research teams will hire specialists to comb campaign, activist, and lobbyist weblogs for dirt. Every weblog post from this election cycle is fair game. Would this help or hurt Kos's election chances?
11. En mi primera lengua. News translations on the fly, continuing a reverse cultural imperialism where English absorbs ideas and words from around the world. RSS and Atom will face semitic times of day and non-Gregorian calendars.
12. VNRs. Video News Releases will come along with citizen journalism. Citizen flackery and propaganda.
13. My News Station. We saw a handcrafted version of this in the Dean campaign. HowardDean.tv used DishTV, cable news, and hacked TiVos to collect news. They also collected video from the field, from students and volunteers, and cut it into a daily TV news program. That will become automatic. News aggregators (Bloglines) and discovery systems (Google News (clusters by topic), Technorati (clusters by reference), Daypop (what's hot)) will group and cut together syndicated videos based on location, time, and subject; create a montage of related footage; and stream a custom video channel just for you. 
14. Community stations. Following Hoder's advice on regional blogosphere building, we'll see "people's news" become a trusted alternative to state and corporate media. Military professionals will prioritize community blog servers right after radio and television stations. It won't happen in this decade because John Kerry should be able to keep the peace for the next 8 years, but the next time a country fears an attack by the US, watch their blogosphere come under attack from within.
15. Big screens enter. What do you do with a 250 megapixel monitor? Something 5 feet tall by 8 feet wide at paper resolution? Could you create a dynamic montage of video and stills that reflected your interests over time, relative popularity and proximity of news stories. The World Wide Wall® of News: a must for every corporate Chief, political war room, and mayor.  

Where do you think citizen journalism be in 2010?

[aka community]

Grassroots  journalism, meet grassroots fundraising. It took 1 form and about 5 minutes. Now I'm on my way to raising $10,000 for John Kerry by inviting other bloggers to join my Citizen Journalists Kerry 100 Club: 100 people at $100 each.

Take a moment to grok this.

A handful of volunteers in the beach resort of Santa Cruz, California, adopted an offline fundraising practice. Work your circle of friends. Colleagues from work, fellow students, the gardening club. Ask them to match your $100. It worked fast and easy on the ground.

So they took it to the web. A quick Deanspace installation, a little screen scraping of the JohnKerry.com donation site, some writing and graphics, and they're helping people give.

What they're not doing is just as important. No money kept; money goes straight to the campaign. No incorporation. No federal election rules to worry over. Frictionless. And two weeks from idea to go-live, maybe?

What can we learn from this?

1. Test human behavior before designing tools.
2. Free platforms that do 90% of the job speed everyone's time to market.
3. Open code platforms invite innovation and adaptation that create new kinds of value.
4. Campaign architectures can become hubs for innovators, leveraging prior financial, regulatory, branding, and systems investments. I can't wait for the DNC APIs.

While you're pondering, pull out your credit card and click here, why don't you. It's for a good cause and in a good name. Or create your own club.

Virality, anyone?

[aka community]

Judith Meskill tipped me that Silicon Valley Web Guild is hosting a panel on social network systems, another evening of YASNS puffery. May 6. Four smart people are speaking for their products. Tribe's Mark Pincus, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (whom Marc Canter says I must get to know; Hi, Reid!), Adrian Scott (who preceded Ryze with an insightful essay on why you must scale your address book), and Spoke's Andy Halliday.

I have a challenge for moderator Rosemary Remacle:

Channel danah boyd.

The honeymoon's over. Ask tough questions.

All these systems depend on people volunteering time and attention, on their pimping friends into the system, on believing you can turn virtual connections into social capital, web pages into gold.

• What's in it for me?
• Do social network systems (SNS) get you love, sex, or friendship? get you competitive career advantage? get you elected? get you productive?
• What's in it for the person who only has a few "friends"? 
• Do SNS's turn into anything more than a slightly smarter address book?
• What is your early conversion rate, the proportion of people who try your system and stick with it after 30 days? after 90?
• How do you avoid the Geocities problem of web page tombstones, profiles grown stale and abandoned?
• Why do you think your forms are a useful representation of me as a person?
• Are you modeling how people really interact or some oversimplification?
• Can I leave my contacts to my children?
• How do you turn my contacts into action?
• Aren't you making it easier for bad actors to be more effective at identity theft, stalking, and emotional abuse?
• Don't your systems burn my contacts, expending my social capital without real benefit?

Then ask about the enterprise version.

• How will this create value within a mid to large organization?
• Why is this more urgent than, say, spending another $100 per head on social skill training or antispam software or giving everyone a news portal?
• Will your system work within firewalls?
• How will your system work across firewalls? How do you expose just some of the profile of some of the people in an organization to some of the public?
• If my company has Spoke inside and my customer has the Google Orkut Appliance, how will they work together?
• What about cultural boundaries?
• Why should employees invest their time and trust in an enterprise SNS when they know their profiles will be left behind when they move on? 
• Why is your explicit declaration of relationships better than their tacit discovery?
• With what other enterprise IT systems will you integrate your SNS?  

Then speak for those of us who invest:

• How will you make money now?
• How will you compete when AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft follow Google into social networks? You know they're going to turn their buddy lists, email groups, blogrolls, and discussion forums into some version of an SNS. What will you do better and differently?
• Orkut was one programmer's side project. Where's the barrier to entry?

This should be a trial by fire, Rosemary.  They're smart and have been on the road for more than a year, bored to their gills. Do them a favor. Pull teeth until they give up the answers. Be the skeptical interrogator I know you can be.

[aka community]

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

• social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
• time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
• threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
• urls pointing to the web,
• enclosures passed along, and
• entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

1. Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
2. Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
3. Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

EQ is more important than IQ.

Everything in campaigns is about emotion. Values trigger emotions, as do symbols of those values. And emotions get you money, volunteers, votes.

Campaigns are tough on the emotions.

A local DFA leader said "Anger Unifies" at the last Democratic Unity Meetup. Lots of adrenalin. Ups and downs. I went to three Dean meetups the night after the California primary, the day Dr. Dean withdrew from the race. I saw frustration, despair, anger, denial, and loss. But I also saw resolve, support, and bonds with their fellow Dean faithful. In a race that lasts six weeks, you can turn up the emotional volume. But what do you do with a race that lasts 100 weeks?

You can't pick your comrades.

We encounter every "people problem" that HR pros prepare for, that social workers encounter, that psychiatrists commit for, in grassroots campaigning. The persistently off-topic person. Trolls. The person who thinks everything is interesting and emails you about it, and your 500 fellow volunteers. Fair weather friends. The craven mercenary. The paranoid. The narrowly obsessed (we almost started a John Kerry's Hair weblog back in September '03). The person who picks fights. The lonely. The shy. It takes centered, socially adept people to work with these people.  

Burnout is a huge problem.

We're lucky to have any active volunteers survive the primary season. It's expensive to volunteer. You're giving up recreation that might have been keeping you sane. You're spending less time on friends, family, and your love life. You may even trade off time you could be working or looking for work, dipping into savings or living frugally. I know volunteers who put off graduation, that lost a job, that neglected their health. So recruiting well rises to the top 5 issues every week.

When grassroots groups pay for their own expenses, they go to jail or embarrass their candidate/cause.

My group, East Bay Kerry, is unincorporated and not a PAC and not recognized by the FEC or IRS. If we take money from an organization to print fliers or buy buttons, we're breaking the law. If we sell buttons at a table, we're breaking the law. If we keep a few bucks from a house party to pay for the party's pizzas, we're breaking the law. It's paralyzing.

We need ways to legally raise and spend money without screwing John Kerry for President or the DNC.

Hoisting: those higher on the scale of commitment recruit those lower on that ladder, and work to bring them up.

There's a clear ladder of political engagement. It runs from "I can vote?" to elected official. At each step of the ladder, we pull up those behind us. If you volunteer for 2 hours every two years, you call someone to vote this year. If you're leading a writers bureau, you recruit new members from those who were previously interested but not volunteering.  

How much does that happen in the workplace?

Rarely.

Self-interest doesn't often lead to such seemingly altruistic behavior.

But if it is in the campaign's interest (or the enterprise's), how can you institutionalize pulling folks behind you up the ladder? How do you make each leader's success dependent on the growth of replacement leaders and fresh blood?

The new labor market features increased competition for great talent, increased employee turnover and shorter tenures. So hoisting becomes a competitive advantage. How well do you align incentives with hoisting behavior? How well do you incorporate

There is no organizing software that thinks of the user as the voter or volunteer.

All the commercial tools for running electoral or advocacy campaigns is top down, center out. CRM for politics. Clueless, in the Cluetrain Manifesto sense.

Keep all that stuff, though. It works.

Add new edge-powered stuff. Let anyone say "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" Without approval from a hierarchy. Decentralized authority and the tools to act on it. And then help that nugget of energy flourish internally, and in interaction with others.

There are no tools for committee-scale organizations to be productive.

I want to put on a lecture series for John Kerry. Or host a bowling league fundraiser. Or mentor a Swing State grassroots team. Or coordinate high school students in growing Or coordinate 75 Earth Day activities.

Where are the tools that let me plan, staff, fund, schedule, coordinate, train, account, syndicate, dunn, manage, remind, and otherwise get things done?

Where are the recipes for getting things done? And the place to post my own?

We need team-scale productivity tools.

No grassroots organization is an island.

This is from some analysis I did for ActivistTech or DemTech or whatever it's called: A hypothetical bridge commission.

My speakers bureau in East Bay - West of the Tunnel works with other committees

• Fundraising
• Media relations
• Writers
• Swing state

Both ours, and those of East Bay East of the Tunnel, San Francisco's grassroots Kerryfolks, local union organizations, the Wellstone Club's speakers bureau, the official campaign, venue hosts, etc. More than 200 political and activist groups are players in the Bay Area's East Bay. Each committee in my organization needs to be able to manage the life cycle of relationships with each of the others. To get things done: events, money, recruiting, media, etc.

Where are the tools for identifying potential relationships, making them real, sustaining them, and gracefully retiring them?

Blogging remains absurdly difficult.

And the tools don't make it any easier.

Information overload is a real problem without practices or tools for managing it.

Just before the California primary, I was receiving more than 500 political emails daily. I didn't even get to look at my thousand RSS feeds.

When we got to 10 daily emails on our local Yahoo! group, people started unsubscribing faster than they were joining.

We're experimenting with multiple email channels (high and low volume, broad and niched, ad hoc and scheduled) but it's all confusing to our volunteers.

How much fatigue will the average voter feel in 200 days, if this keeps up? How can we lower the political noise? Does tuning out mean voters stay home?

Ok, so I'm off to a meeting of the Speakers Bureau.

I am so fucking ready to rant about this; that kind of day.

To recap, Dave Winer starts a BloggerCon thread saying Shirky's Power Laws rationalize a blogger aristocracy. Nick Denton says "in internet media, a peasant can become king." Seth Finkelstein pines for "a session on wealth and poverty run by Martha Stewart." Frank Paynter says you have to be born lucky to break into the A-list: talent and "deadly serious intention" need money and leisure time. Then JT invokes Sturgeon's Law, the ignorant overcoming the expert, our trust in celebrity and cats swarming to move the D-List to the C-List. Seth rebuts: "1) Be content with your lot in life. 2) The weathy deserve it since they are talented and apply themselves (while the poor are shiftless and lazy). 3) Work hard, be optimistic, and you could succeed too. 4) Anyway, it's better here than in Russia or China." jt adds that craving an audience doesn't breed excellence.

First, reading blogs is a zero sum game. Each person on earth has only so much disposable attention. Every content publisher competes for that finite pool. It's not the blogosphere, of course, but the entire mediasphere and the real world fighting for attention.

The very popularity of weblogs and their ease for new entrants means that our marketplace for attention becomes more efficient. Like any nearly efficient market, overall rents (profits distributed) average toward zero. In an attention market, that means you may get your shot at the big time, but your content had better meet some niche's needs superbly or you're toast.

Fairness? Equal distribution of attention means that everyone has to read more dreck and that nobody ever gets to discover classics or bestsellers. What's more, when there were ten thousand active bloggers in the world, you could really see your shot. You could see your stats rise as newbies followed previously blazed blogrolls.

But it's wrong to expect opportunity to scale. Sure, you might get discovered at Schwab's soda fountain. But in attention terms, it's amazing if your neighborhood billboard for the local pub gets noticed, let alone talked about. And you'd be flabbergasted if the Murphy's Dive poster was mentioned in a local trade rag, let alone the town paper, or picked up in syndication. And you'd be right to be surprised. Because Budweiser just spent $100 million in your state, spending it on high production value and primo placement. And what is your little 8x20 foot sign going to do against that kind of presence? Millions of people know Bud's brand, not Murphy's.

But that little sign may do the trick. It may be placed just so around the corner and remind enough locals that yours is the classy dive bar, the one with singing on Tuesday nights. And it could be the difference between breaking even and setting aside a little for retirement.

And you may even do some co-operative advertising. Take a little of that Anheuser-Busch cash and stick a Bud neon sign in the window. The regulars won't care, but passers-by may get enough of a familiar tug to walk through the door. A-list links are like that; someone with a lot of juice throwing a little attention your way, knowing you've got your own readership and you're gonna siphon its attention right back to the A-list's circle, and in spades.

We complain of advertising overload. Spam, ad pollution, telemarketers. Screaming for attention so loud it makes you pluck out your eyes just so you don't have to see one more inanity. Your ears bleed with fatigue. Your thumb builds a callous from using the remote to change channels or TiVo-ahead in commercial avoidance.

And into this we drop vox populi and speak of Voice. So now I must read the inanities published by family, and they mine. And the drivel of my co-workers. And the read of my lackluster performance on last night's date. And the adolescent self-involvement of TRL-addled hormone machines. It's like the Pennysaver on steroids. Listings of ton's of other people's useless trash begging for a new home, in this case a temporary place in my brain.

So we tune the cacophany out, we avert our eyes.

And stick with the three bars we know, along the beaten path. And if word comes about a new beer, we might try it, but it better be worth giving up the comfort of a cold Bud.

Technorati, you say? Daypop? Feedster? All the wonderful tools of discovery and navigation? Yeah, I saw that beer distributor's magazine too. It had picture and reviews and blurbs on all sorts of beers and ales, local and national brands, imports too. But I don't have time to try a million beers. Bud's good enough most of the time. It does the job. And I have better things to do than waste time and my hard earned coin on suds I might not like. I already know what I get with Bud and the occasional Anchor Steam.

Besides, there's a game on. Why am I talking to you?

[aka klogs]