The passion of delegate blogs
July 31, 2004
Of the scores of people blogging from the Democratic Convention, perhaps most notable has been the dozens of delegates blogging the convention, which offer interesting first-person perspectives that the public previously didn’t get.
The delegate bloggers are doing a good job of capturing the excitement the Democrats at the convention are feeling. There may not be a lot of news, but for a lot of people this is a big deal, and that really comes through when you read the jubilant postings on the delegate blogs.
One good delegate blog is Virtually There 2004, written by Washington State delegates, because it includes a nice mix of personal details — “I rode the T over here to the wharf with Janet Reno on the train!” — and political insight, such as dicussion of the loyalties of Dean delegates. The delegate blogs even create a new level of dialogue between delegates and the rest of America, as people can e-mail the delegates and, in the case of Virtually There 2004, text message their comments directly to the delegation on the floor. What a fantastic use of technology to engage the public in the political process!
Drop those subscription walls!
July 30, 2004
Tech Daily and all online National Journal publications were free to the public this week for the Democratic Convention and during GOP convention week. Smart thinking from the National Journal — a good way to attract new potential subscribers.
NYTimes.com audio panorama
July 29, 2004
NYTimes.com created several very cool 360-degree interactive panoramic images — with audio — from this week’s Democratic National Convention in Boston. NYTimes.com took the shots with a special “EventCam” from Kaidan, Inc., which uses ten Canon S60 digital cameras to simultaneously capture a panoramic image….
Cool convention diary
July 29, 2004
Washington Post Associate Editor Robert Kaiser and Pulizer Prize winning photographer Lucian Perkins have been collecting notes and photos for a neat Flash convention diary on washingtonpost.com. Embedded into the familiar concept of a yellow spiral notebook, users will find journal entries, slide shows, transcripts of live discussions with readers, and audio clips from the convention.
This has it all — multimedia, insight and interactivity.
Wildfire forces newspaper into enlightening blogging experiment
July 29, 2004
The Nevada Appeal newspaper launched its first Weblog as part of its coverage of a local wildfire and it quickly took on a life of its own, with minute-by-minute updates coming from the entire newsroom. In the end the content produced for the Web site was repackaged for the newspaper.
NevadaAppeal.com Internet Editor Kirk Caraway describes how the 17,000 circulation paper pulled this off in this report for CyberJournalist.net…
Video blogging the convention
July 29, 2004
Is video blogging the next big thing?
While most bloggers are content posting text and a few poor-quality photos, Steve Garfield has been video blogging the convention.
Garfield tells CyberJournalist.net why:
Video Blogging gives the viewer more information than a text blog. I’ve been experimenting with video blogging since the first of the year and thought that the DNC would be a great week to go out and practice some Citizen Journalism.
For giving the reader/viewer a sense of what happened, the video post is much more effective.
People are really excited about seeing things that the major media outlets are not showing.
Take for example the Wes Clark speech. I was there and felt the hall erupt with enthusiasm after he spoke about the flag. Digby had linked to the Salon article, which I could only read a portion of since it required a subscription, which told you about what happened, but my video actually showed the excitement and I think it really comes through.
Attack on Doubleclick affects news sites
July 28, 2004
After an Internet attack on ad company Doubleclick’s servers this week, users experienced delays accessing pages at washingtonpost.com before The Washington Post Co. blocked DoubleClick’s ads from running on its site. CNN.com also had trouble serving ads.
A good reminder that “hackers don’t need to attack the Internet,? said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the SANS Institute?s Internet Storm Center. ?If you attack Akamai or DoubleClick you can take out 95 percent of what most people consider to be the Internet.”
washingtonpost.com Best Blogs contest
July 28, 2004
washingtonpost.com has launched a Best Blogs — Politics and Elections 2004 Readers Choice awards. Nominations began this week and run through Sept. 3. Voting for finalists begins Sept. 27 and winners will be announced on Oct. 25. Among the categories: “Best Democratic Party Coverage, Best Republican Party Coverage, Most Original, Most Likely to Last Beyond Election Day, Class Clown and Best Campaign Dirt.”
ABC launches 24/7 digital news channel
July 28, 2004
ABC News launched ABC News Now this week, a digital cable offering in some of the markets where ABC owns stations, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and via the Internet to those with broadband access. ABC News Now is essentially a rebranding of “ABC News Live,” a 24-hour news and live-event video stream available to broadband Internet subscribers that launched in March 2003. ABC News Now also will be available free for the lucky few who have digital television sets or wireless phones that play video. About 210,000 AOL subscribers watched Monday’s 7 p.m. show. That’s small in television terms, but it did surpass the streaming video of a Dave Matthews concert. Rock on!
Convention blogs: ‘lively, partisan, trivial, weighty, irreverent…’
July 28, 2004
The Baltimore Sun’s David Folkenflik says convention blogs are “lively, partisan, trivial, weighty, irreverent or irrelevant.”
They incorporate visual cues such as maps, photographs or political ads with written analyses and online links to reports from the traditional press, sometimes with cutting commentary. And they encourage responses and rebuttals from readers - the conversational “threads” that often feed further commentaries from the bloggers themselves.
Web logs offer a perfect format for an event invested with political emotion but little true news, says Jonathan Dube, managing producer for MSNBC.com and publisher of cyberjournalist.net.
“The most interesting information tends to be tidbits of observations, gossip and news nuggets,” Dube says by e-mail. “The bloggers - particularly the delegate bloggers - are doing a good job of capturing the excitement the Democrats at the convention are feeling. There may not be a lot of news, but for a lot of people this is a big deal, and that really comes through.”