A Post Broadcast Convention?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 18:21(Originally published at Greater Democracy.)
Much has been written about post-broadcast politics, networked politics, or any other number of phrases about the political process moving beyond the thirty second soundbite on the evening news. Obama’s use of the Internet has been compared to JFK’s use of television. JFK understood the new medium of television and used it to his advantage, just as Obama has understood the new medium of the Internet and used it to his advantage. Yet campaigns remain very top down organizations, with control centralized.
Perhaps the most highly controlled and centralized traditional media extravaganza remaining in politics is the national conventions. Yet, slowly, even these are changing. The Obama campaign has moved his acceptance speech to Invesco Field to allow 75,000 people to participate first hand.
How participatory will this be? The Associated Press reports,
Enter the 75,000 people who will have to come hours early for Obama's acceptance speech to get through security, most carrying cell phones. As they settle in their seats, campaign aides will be on stage asking them to text message their friends and use call sheets to get people to register. "There will be a lot of idle time. We put idle people to work," Hildebrand said.
While there are concerns about the bandwidth available in the stadium, this is a great start. However, I would like to see it go much further. Why only use text messages from the attendees of the acceptance speech? The convention is four days long. There are lots of interesting things that take place during those four days, much of it away from the convention floor.
Sure, the DNC has credentialed a record number of bloggers to cover the convention, making sure that there are bloggers covering each state. Yet what is really needed is to take the message from both Gov. Dean and Sen. Obama about empowering people to be the change that they want to see.
Every delegate should receive information ahead of time about how they can use all aspects of social media, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and so many others, from their cellphones at any point during the convention. They should be encouraged to publicize their social media accounts so their friends, family, neighbors, constituents, and anyone else they can get to listen.
Slowly, but surely, I’m contacting delegates and getting them to think about how they could do this. Please, consider doing the same.
To continue this discussion, Tuesday evening, 8 PM Eastern time, I will host a BlogTalkRadio show about Getting Democrat Delegates to Denver to Use Social Media. Please consider listening and if you have some ideas to share, calling in.
Where on Earth will YOU vote?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/04/2008 - 09:50
Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/03/2008 - 20:17It has been a busy day, and I’m still trying to catch up. EntreCard announced their new toolbar today. I’ve played a little bit with it. It is good for buying ads more quickly, but doesn’t really help me a lot with the way I prefer to surf blogs on EntreCard. More on this later.
Fiona did her radio show again this evening. It went quite well. This is a show where I talk with Fiona about what is going on and we have friends and relatives call in.
I’m still kicking around social media tools for delegates going to Denver, and I hope to write more about this soon as well. Also, I need to follow up on Laconi.ca stuff.
Democratic Delegates to Denver using Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/02/2008 - 09:45This morning, I had a fascinating discussion with Jen Just, who will be an Obama Delegate from Connecticut to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. One of the topics we discussed was the use of Social Media by delegates. We are both very interested in how delegates can use social media to widen the discussion around the convention and bring the message home.
To illustrate some of the tools available, I called into Utterz from my cellphone to leave this message about our discussion. It is from a cellphone in an area with poor coverage, so the voice is a little choppy, but still the message was up immediately and shows the power of how these tools can be used.
To continue the discussion, Jen and I will be doing a call in radio show Tuesday evening at 8 PM EDT on BlogTalkRadio about Democrat Delegates to Denver Using Social Media. If you are interested, please listen, and if you have some interesting comments, please call in.
There are a lot of things that delegates, bloggers, and guests to the convention can do to make it a powerful experience for everyone, but we need to start setting up things now.
Laconica 0.5.0 Upgrade and Related Developments
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 17:41Last night, I began testing Laconica 0.5.0 on microblog. It is an update from Laconica 0.4.4. I created a new tarball, laconica050.tar.gz. I initially had some problems with OpenID and found that there was a patch to the OpenID code that is in the laconicadepends.tar.gz, so I created a new file, laconicadepends01.tar.gz. This didn’t fix the problem, and subsequently I found that for some reason my 0.5.0 hadn’t been properly installed and on reinstalling that the problem went away, so the depends01 file may not be necessary.
Upgrade Steps
Make sure you keep a back up copy of your installation. Then, install laconica050 and laconicadepends01 into your laconica directory. Copy over your config.php file. You should note that there are a bunch of new options in the config.php, so you may want to take the options you set in your config.php and copy them into the config.php.sample file and save that as your new config.php file.
Copy over any theme you have created. Copy over the avatars that have been created.
The Database Update
The database has changed a lot from 0.4.4 and earlier. Instead of trying to come up with all the alter statements necessary, I took a script that Evan had written and generalized it to work in my environment.
#!/bin/bash
export DB=$1
export SCR=$2
export USER=$3
export PW=$4
export HOST=$5mysqldump -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST -c -t --hex-blob $DB > $DB.sql
mysqladmin -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST -f drop $DB
mysqladmin -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST create $DB
mysql -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST $DB < $SCR
mysql -u $USER --password=$PW -h $HOST $DB < $DB.sql
It worked very nicely for me. However, just to be safe, I did take a backup copy before I ran the script, separate from the backup copy that gets created at the beginning of the script.
With all of this in place (once my 0.5.0 version was properly in place), everything started working nicely. New features include hashtags, which I’m a big fan of, and I’m glad to see incorporated into the site. I’ve gotten SMS working, at least for sending out notices. Incoming SMS probably won’t work well because of how email is configured on my shared host.
One other problem that I had, which I’m not sure if it was because of the failed initial upgrade, or something else, but the public timeline didn’t show any of the entries prior to the upgrade. This wasn’t a big concern for me, and for more active sites, most people would never notice.
I’m still having problems with people being able to remotely subscribe to my microblog. When I turn on database debugging, it works, but when debugging is off, it doesn’t work. Go figure.
Other Stuff
The next thing that I was thinking about was adding TwitterFeed like functionality. Twitterfeed checks RSS feeds and submits a summary to Twitter. To my surprise, Twitter Feed has been modified to support Laconica. What is even better is that it supports any server running Laconica, so, I’ve set it up to send the RSS feed from my blog not only to Twitter, but also to identi.ca as well as my personal Microblog.
Another very interesting development is the translation tool for laconi.ca. I haven’t played with that yet, so I don’t have any details.
So, after a few minor problems, the 0.5.0 upgrade went very nicely. I’m interested to see how it goes for any of the other Laconica sites. Please leave your notes in the comments.
