"While You weren't Looking, Blogs Revolutionized Politics!"

LAWRENCE LESSIG is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Author of "The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace"

A few weeks ago he interviewed JOE TRIPPI (Howard Dean's Campaign Manager) about the campaign, the role of blogs, online architecture, fundraising, and modern politics.

Here is an exerpt of that interview, with a link to the whole interview below:



L: Did blogs come to Dean, or did Dean come to blogs?

T: That's an interesting question. For almost 2 I've been an avid reader of blogs ?- commenting occasionally, but mostly a lurker. About 18 months ago I was reading a myDD.com blog, and there was some comments that this guy Howard Dean might be running for President. I made a comment or two and I came back a couple days later and then began reading the blog pretty constantly. When I came on as campaign manager, I knew we wanted to do a blog, but I didn't have a big sense of urgency about it. I had a bunch of other things to worry about, but then two things happened that I think are interesting.

The first was meetup.com. I was reading the myDD.com blog one day, and saw this interesting thing called meetup.com that some of the Dean people from around the country were trying to use to meet up about Howard Dean. That caused me to check the meetup.com site. Within a few weeks, we'd made the decision that we were going to encourage people to do meetup.com. That idea came straight from a blog myDD.com.

The second was another little twist of fate, or maybe destiny. A guy named Matt Gross came wandering into my office one day. He told me he had just driven from Utah because he cared so much about Howard Dean. He had decided to drive to Burlington without calling first, looking for a job. He managed to maneuver past the receptionist's desk and stuck his head in long enough to scream out, "I wrote for the myDD blog.com"! I immediately said, "You're hired!" And I think about 48 hours later he had this really ugly blog up that was on Blogspot. He was going to run back to Utah and get all his belongings and come back, but I said he had a job on the condition that he got a blog up before he left. And so in 3 or 4 hours, he created what was then the "Call to Action" blog. It was cute and ugly at the same time, but I think it was the first blog of a presidential campaign....

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T: '...The response we are getting and the ideas that come off of it (the revised blog) are just amazing. The comments section is just such an amazing thing. Little things you never would have thought of: Zephyr [Teachout] came up with the idea of having a poster that was downloadable and printable for each state, with a goal of getting a million of these posters put up ?- for example, "New Hampshire for Dean" ?- as a way to get visibility going. We put that up with the links of all fifty states and immediately afterwards, one of the first comments was, "I'm registered to vote, I'm working overseas in London, there's a lot of American expats here, and you know, I'd really love to have an Americans Abroad for Dean poster that I can put up and that my friends overseas can put." Two minutes later another post comment was, "I'm in Spain, and you guys shouldn't forget about us, you should do Americans abroad...."


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L: So let's say I'm a campaign manager of a different presidential campaign, and I say to you, look, I've got an email list that is ten times the size of your blog list, and I accept feedback, people can send me email back telling me where I screwed up. Why is what you're doing better than what I'm doing, if my list is ten times bigger than yours?

T: One, it's faster ?- sometimes almost in real-time, if you sit there and read the comments while you're doing it. You can really talk-out the ideas. But I think more importantly, there's a sense of community that forms around the blog. That's really what the Net is about. It's about building a community. There may be zillions of communities within the Net, but you know, your own community builds around that blog.

L: So it's a community because people are both reading and writing at the same time about these ideas?

T: I think they're both reading and writing the ideas, but the other thing is that there is a sense of community. There's a sense of, "We're part of each other, and we're trying to find our way." No matter whether it's an issue of importance to the campaign or the nation, we're all exchanging these ideas in common cause ?- except for the trolls, of course.

L: Let's talk a bit about the trolls. If I'm a traditional campaign manager, the first thing I'd say is, "My God, you're giving up control here, and look what you're going to face: you're going to face a world of trolls and how are you ever going to get over that?" How do you answer the trolls?

T: Well, actually, they came up with that ingenious thing over at the blog. They actually created a Dean Team. We have a team-raiser thing where you can contribute money, and they created a "troll team-raiser," Dean-raiser, so that any time a troll comes on, everybody automatically goes and contributes to the troll Dean-raiser account. It's actually been pretty effective. Thousands of dollars have been raised because of the trolls. And this is no joke. It's not one of those things where they go, "Oh, a troll, everybody go pay the troll Dean-raiser." They actually go do it. So if you come on our blog and trash Dean, what you've done is help him raise $500 that half hour. So that's done some job in discouraging them....'


For the whole interview go to:
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001428.shtml#001428

To visit the Dean Blog go to:
http://www.blogforamerica.com/

ADDENDUM
The Dean campaign now has nearly 300,000 volunteers, and goals for 450,000 by Sept. 3oth and one million by the end of the year.

Nearly all signed up over the internet.