BloggerCon
Now that has to be the most common headline in the
blogosphere today.
Dave Winer just said that the Dean campaign is only a start,
dismissing it as no more than a start, that eventually the voters should
write the campaign
blogs,
not the campaign itself. That seems to me to be true already with the Dean
campaign. Matt Gross, the campaign's chief blogger, is a blogger who just
showed up
one
day at
the
campaign because he felt it ought to have a blog. So, whether or not Matt
is a voter or a campaign worker is questionable. When I spent a week at the
campaign as a volunteer worker, I discovered that even the paid staffers
(by far the minority) functioned as volunteers–they're voters who feel so
strongly that they somehow find a way to work on the campaign full time for
slave wages or less. And the campaign blog is written by several of the staffers
who have become celebrities themselves. NYC Deaniacs enthused about getting
their autographs at the Bryant Park Rally!
I'd like to clarify a huge misunderstanding about the Dean
campaign, arising from not digging deep enough to get it how the campaign
blog works: The real story of the Dean campaign is not the official blog,
but
the comments
to
the
blog.
The abundant,
passionate
and uncannilycomments
are the
fuel
for
this campaign. The threads they build there are the way this community maintains
its community. And, importantly, they are half a million people who have
explicitly declared themselves to be a community, which explicitly proves
that this is precisely what Dave says it is not.
A Natural Law for Trolls?
I just called Dave on that issue, and his response is that
there's a natural law that if you have comments turned on long enough, the
trolls will flood the place and make it uninhabitable, (especially, regarding
this case, if Rush Limbaugh links
to it). I opined that natural laws are routinely revised and that the Dean
campaign's
success
with
comments requires us to update that law, if there is one.
Kevin Marks just
pointed out that a differentiator is whether commenters are responding to
a single item, which brings out the
worst in us, or whether they expect to continue interacting over time. For
the Dean campaign, the vast
majority
of commenters
are committed to another year of building a presidency and the next 8 years
helping to manage that presidency.
When a troll shows up, they thank the troll for reminding
them to contribute to the Dean Troll Fund, and leave it at that. In other
words, each of the commenters doesn't feel required to respond to others,
treating the comments tool as their Dean-oriented blogging tool.
Jim Moore agrees
that the Dean comments are inspiring and are demonstrating the unexpected
effect of comments that are both voluminous
and civil. This new phenomenon deserves some serious attention.
11:46:25 AM 
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