There is an old say, follow your passion and the money will follow. Well, I’ve been following my passion, and I’m still waiting. This evening, my passion has me sitting on a train into New York City. I will be having dinner with Dean Landsman to talk about blogs, radio, podcasting, and who knows what else.

Today, I downloaded iPodder and have loaded a couple Podcasts onto my laptop. I am listening to Coverville. It is a 25 meg file that I downloaded via iPodder and copied to my laptop. My initial reaction to iPodder was, “Where is the good content?” Coverville is some of that good content. At this moment, I’m listening to Sid Vicious singing, “My way”. This is the sort of stuff you can’t get on the canned anesthetized mainstream media.

As I listen to the podcast, I am reading, “We the Media” by Dan Gillmor. He writes, “What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is voice – they are clearly written by human beings with genuine human passion.” He goes on to contrast this with “Most corporate web sites [which are] . . . like most annual reports: static, stiff and turgid, with the most revealing information hidden in footnotes – sometimes to disguise the truth, not tell it – and led by a ‘Letter from the Chief Executive’ (or vacuous mission statement) that appears to be written by a committee of lawyers and marketing people.”

As I write this, I stop to think of the speeches that were delivered at the Democratic National Convention. With the exception of Al Sharpton, who deviated from the prepared speech, every speech appeared to have been written by a committee of lawyers and marketing people.

As people discuss what has gone wrong with the Democratic Party, they discuss if we need someone further from the right or someone from the south. Perhaps Marshall McLuhan was right. Perhaps the medium is the message. When you look at some of what Kerry has done as a senator, such as his work with BCCI investigations, he is really a great senator. However, when you look at him through the lens of the lawyers and marketing people, he’s pretty dull, just like how Gore ended up being pretty dull.

Yes, passion is frightening. Many people say that Dean’s scream, or perhaps the corporate media’s covering of the scream did him in. He had passion, and that is frightening to people.

Some people are suggesting that we Democrats need to return to church. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps the first lesson needs to be Revelation 3:16, “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of my mouth”.