If you're blogging the conference, we'd like to include your feed in the conventionbloggers-style aggregator, here...

http://cred.conventionbloggers.com/

This is the aggregator software we used for last year's Democratic and Republican conventions.

The aggregator polls each site every ten minutes, so it should be useful during the conference for getting a real-time idea what people are saying publicly about the conference. We will also include people who are listening on the webcast, not just people covering the conference in the room.

If there are any problems, please post a comment here.

Dave

PS: If you have a blog that's not included in the list being polled, please send me a private email. If the past is any indicator, there will be feeds that don't work. Not much we can do about that, unfortunately.

Welcome to the ConventionBloggers site for the 2004 Republican National Convention.

If you have any comments or questions about the site itself, please post them here.

If you have a RNC-covering site, and you're going to be inside the convention, that is, you have a pass, and your site is not included in the RNC community site, please post a comment here with three bits of information:

1. The name of your site.

2. The URL of your site.

3. The URL of your feed (RSS or Atom).

4. A very brief explanation of how you're going to cover the convention (to help keep out the spam).

I'm working on Friday and Saturday to catch up. Sorry to fall so far behind but I'm actually driving cross-country now, but I have some time with a good net connection while I'm camped out in Madison.

In preparation for the Republican convention, I've switched the content of the home page of conventionbloggers.com to reflect the work of the Republican bloggers. The DNC blogs are still being aggregated, at a different address. Sorry for the confusion about this. I'm traveling and obviously thinking about other things.

 

Thanks to Lauren Gelman at Stanford Law School's Center for the Internet & Society, we have a nice place to meet on Monday between 4PM and 6:30PM.

The meeting is open to all who are interested blogging the conventions. Several people who blogged at the DNC last week in Boston will be present. We will have a discussion about what happened, what we learned, and what we want to take-away from the experience.

The meeting is in Room 185 on the main floor of the Law School classroom building. 4PM. Send your MAC address to gelman at stanford dot edu before Friday this week if you want to use WiFi at the meeting.

PS: After the meeting we can join up with the Scripting Noodles dinner already on the schedule for 7PM in Palo Alto.

I want to turn this site over to Republican bloggers in the lead-up to and during the Republican convention in NYC. So far, I know of 12 bloggers who have received credentials for the RNC. If you know of others, please post the usual three piece of information:

1. The name of the weblog.

2. The address of its home page.

3. The address of its RSS feed.

4. A brief one sentence explanation of how it will cover the convention (to keep out spam).

As with the DNC, you don't have to be credentialed to be included, delegates with blogs, or staff, are totally okay.

The decision to include or not will be based on whether or not the blog meets the criteria, no test of political correctness will be applied. If you're blogging the RNC we want your site included.

Also, as before, the subscription list will be open, published in OPML.

Postscript: The RNC Convention Bloggers site is running. Still a few glitches, but it works.

So now that you're home, and caught up on sleep, what lessons would you like to pass on to the next people who blog a convention?

What hardware did you bring? Cables? Microphone? Camera? PDA? Cell phone? Etc.

And what did you forget to bring?

If you had it to do over, what would you do differently?

None of the critics have hit the sweet spot on what the bloggers should have done at the DNC. None have even come close. Not one. Let me explain...

There are two parts to citizen journalism. One part is the journalism of course. Think about the other part. In the age of citizen journalism we're not supposed to wait for candidates to define themselves (a hopeless idea, it gets us choices like Gore-Bush and Bush-Kerry) rather we are supposed to define for them, what we want in a candidate, and then find people who meet our criteria. When we look back on the impact of the Internet in politics, that's what it's going to turn out to be. It may take years, and probably will happen at the local level long before it happens at the national level, but it will be the same old decentralization and disintermediation process that happens to everything the Internet touches.

Another idea, which came up during the Gillmor Gang show yesterday, is why didn't we use this opportunity to confront some of the Dems who are in bed with Hollywood over DRM? They act all friendly about the Web, but in the meantime behind some of those closed doors there's no doubt they were talking about selling out the Internet to their friends in Hollywood, who are not friends to the Internet. Steve Gillmor asked why I wasn't doing it. I gave him a straight answer -- I didn't think of it until now.

To the critics, we never in a million years would have thought of it until we had wasted the opportunity. Now the goal is to get back in, asap, in time to save the Net from Hollywood. The Democrats are excited about the Web, seriously excited for good reasons. They have to know that that excitement is incompatible with the idea of crippling the Web to serve the interestes of some very limited thinkers in California.

And get the big idea -- we are not here to replace the ink-stained Pulitzer-winners. If you like what they do, more power to you. What we represent is a populace that can think and decide for itself, without having the problems framed by Wolf, Dan, Judy, Larry, Rush and Sean. Left to grow on its own, the Internet can and will turn around politics the same way it turned around business, education and journalism.

We just need to connect the dots, and listen, because in some ways the Dems are ahead of where we thought they were in understanding how the Internet impacts politics. And keep open the possibility that they are, in some ways, ahead of us in that understanding. I think it's possible that they are. Something to think about.