By the end of the convention the pet bloggers had fled the pound and found their ways home. I’m sure there were some insightful well written posts that came from the convention bloggers, but during the last week nothing remarkable has leaped off the screen at me.
Perhaps I should define “convention blogger.” The Democratic Convention invited more than a few dozen bloggers to join them at the convention, to function – I believe – as sort of a media auxilliary. Dave Winer set up a superfluous aggregation site that hooked in the hopeless political junkies with the real time opinions of bloggers. No search capability, no real subject categorization, that aggregation was like drinking from the firehose. there were two things about the convention that I wanted to check in on… platform development and progressive (read: Kucinich, not Dean) news.
Today, after the fact, without a lot of screening of blogs I won’t be able to see what bloggers had to say about those matters of interest to me. So what I’d like the blog world to provide me is a feed by topic of disparate blogs.
I started running through the blog roll at the absurdly suck, (though pictographically pleasing and cobnvenient as a gathering point) Winer site, and naturally I started with Wonkette since there would likely be news of both progressive politics and anal sex. Unfortunately Wonkette was not blogging the convention, so one wonders why and how she got on the blog roll. One doesn’t actually wonder since Dave is hopelessly enamored of MTV and Ana Marie was working with them this week. You can see how it would be a short hop to the Winermobile’s aggregation of what Boifromtroy was posting to her blog, though she wasn’t strictly speaking a “convention blogger.”
Okay, there were thrity-five convention bloggers and through the good work of Ms. Cox and her surrogate, I found the link to the WSJ article that provides a brief blog bio of each. There must have been dozens more on-site in Boston and/or at the convention who were also blogging, but these were the accredited ones. I have nothing negative to say about this idea of accrediting bloggers to blog the convention. That said, I would expect the not-accredited bloggers to have had as much and as little to say as the accredited ones.
I’m a guy who sat through the first three nights tuned to CNN because I didn’t get it that C-span actually had coverage. I’ll admit to a fondness to listening to Greenfield, my old UW Daily Cardinal editor in cheese. I’ve always been impressed by his work. But the point is, that I could have heard the Kucinich speech live if I’d been tuned to C-span.
The convention itself doesn’t mark the season of my interest in progressive politics, so there will be more opportunity for me to watch and perhaps help a peace consciousness develop out of the pragmatic war rhetoric of the Kerry campaign. Over the next few days I’ll probably review the work done by the convention bloggers just to get a feel of what they had to say.
Blogging is the voice of the people, bubbling up electronically across the whole spectrum of political opinions. I’d hope that with connectivity becoming ubiquitous and tools becoming ever more convenient and portable, that the whole issue of accrediting bloggers will become moot before 2024, when everyone can be a blogger anywhere.
Topdog has a list of delegates who blogged the convention in his blogroll on the left of his blog….
