You know you're obsessed with blogging when

You lie about the size of your readership… in a dream.

Congressional candidate invites bloggers to run his campaign

OK, it’s just for one day, but it’s still an interesting idea: So, you want to manage my campaign for a day?

Online discussion on the impact of participatory media on the 2004 election (Tuesday, Oct 5)

via Susan Mernit’s Blog:

Politics & the Net: Free online discussion this Tuesday: “There’s a free online discussion on The Impact of Participatory Media on Election 2004 happening this Tuesday, October 5, 2004 from 2:00 P.M. to 5:00 P.M. Eastern U.S. Time

Brought to you by The Media Center, a think tank examining the intersection of media, technology and society, this public webcast focuses on the impact of new technologies and participatory media on the Nov. 2 U.S. election.

Join bloggers, cable news, and print journalists to discuss the transformation in information flow and the rise in grassroots activism demonstrated during this election.

Participants include Markos of DailyKos, Retha Hill from BET, the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin, and Jehmu Green, prez of rock the vote . Jason Calcanis is the host.
I am dreaming that Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor are in the audience, along with many others who have much to say. Maybe you?

Register here.”

“See” you there.

Online movement against Gallup poll

A lot of talk online today about the flaws in the most recent presidential Gallup poll – specifically, oversampling Republicans. Kos writes:

Just got off the phone with a reporter from USA Today who is writing a story on potential problems with the Gallup poll, and the liberal blogosphere’s work in bringing attention to the issue.

Here are some applicable links: from the Kos main page, a discussion in a diary on dKos, at the left coaster, and this Reuters article that cites a related ad just out from moveon.org.
This strikes me as the sort of media anti-bias watchdog story that the right has had so much success with. Be interesting to see if the Dem-friendly online world can do as good a job getting a story out into the national conversation as the GOP-friendly online world did with the CBS/forgery story.

No East or West (classic-rock uke take)

Add to my vocal take and Cecil’s sepulchral midi piano take (the “15-foot Christian” one) this reasonably crisp run-through of the melody on ukulele, processed to sound like electric guitar.
Note the hymn originally had a right-boring Anglican melody called St. Peter and this version is set to an African-American spiritual, hence its lovely pentatonic goodness.
Now I should compare the chords Cecil derived from my vocals to the chords of some sheet music I found online recently, which I’m trying to transcribe for my tenor uke.

Finding a better metaphor

I think Annalee Newitz is onto a better frame for blogging than the tired old media-pundit sliver in her Techsploitation column in the SF Bay Guardian: reality TV.

It seems in many ways as if our entire media culture is devoted to broadcasting ephemera. Blogs, like reality TV, record the minutiae of our everyday lives, offering lessons in everything from cooking and manners to patent law and sex. Blogs also record our everyday lives even when we intend them to reflect only information of the moment.

Now they tell us

Peter Beinart at Time has an analysis of the election that suggest, suprise suprise, that with Iraq back as a major campaign issue, maybe Dean may not have been such a poor choice of a nomineee (TIME.com: If Howard Dean Were the Candidate … — Oct. 04, 2004):

Political punditry is harder than it looks. That’s what a lot of Democratic voters must be thinking right about now. Last winter Democratic-voters played political consultant. They tried to step inside the minds of swing voters and figure out which Democratic presidential candidate could beat George W. Bush. With an eye cast coldly on November, they rejected the man who had first won their hearts, Howard Dean, and flocked to the more “electable” choice, John Kerry. Among New Hampshire voters who said beating Bush was their biggest concern, Kerry beat Dean by a whopping 52 points.

Democratic voters should stick to their day jobs. With just five weeks until Election Day, there’s reason to believe they guessed wrong – that Dean would be doing better against Bush than Kerry is.

…

In last week’s TIME poll, Kerry’s biggest deficit versus Bush was in “sticking to his positions.” Only 37% of registered voters in the survey said Kerry does that, compared with 84% for Bush.

Dean wouldn’t have that problem. Polls in Iowa showed him doing best among voters who value a candidate who “takes strong stands.”

Netflix me baby

Gradually, b and I are entering the 21st century. We just got a DVD player (but not a TiVo or other PVR yet, and we still don’t have cable or satellite – how to choose by the way?). So of course I just signed us up for a free NetFlix trial. Our queue should now show up as one of my offsite feeds somewhere in the sidebar here.

Electronic whiteboards (wikis) in the news

A Syracuse paper which published an article that was skeptical about the how authoritative an online collaborative encyclopedia could be has now published a front-page article that is much more positive about wikis (Syracuse.com: NewsFlash – ‘Wikis’ offer knowledge-sharing online).
The article even picks up on my (not that I own it) preference for referring to wikis as whiteboards, since at least in the corporate suites everyone knows what a whiteboard is:

“At its core, a Wiki is an empty room, devoid of furniture and decoration, said Sunir Shah, founder of an online community called Meatball. Visitors bring the personality and mission, turning the Wiki into a library, a party or a conference room.

Wikis are also described as online whiteboards, shared notebooks or group memory. They are forums for sharing knowledge and control — and fostering trust in the process.”

(Via leuschke.org links.)

Repainting the line between news and opinion

J.D. Lasica researches how sites end up on Google News (and why certain political opinions dominate there). He contrasts Yahoo! News’ human approach with Google News’ algorithm-only one; Yahoo says the person-powered one is actually faster.