January 23, 2004
Netroots Are Just Getting Started

There’s a great article running over on FindLaw in which Lauren Gelman argues that Iowa isn’t the beginning of the end for netroots, it’s just the end of the beginning:

Dave Winer, advocate of the citizen-blogger and editor of the Scripting News weblog, explained it this way: Currently, the Dean campaign might choose a blogger who supports Dean, and put him on the Dean bus to blog about the campaign’s day. But there’s a key difference between that, and having hundreds of citizen bloggers who attend Dean events, writing their impressions—good or bad— on their own blogs. And it is the latter that’s revolutionary…

Similarly, Moveon.org chooses the “best” campaign ad and promotes it. But what if, instead, every citizen would create her own TV advertisement endorsing their candidate and post it on their own website? The funnel of the competition would be eliminated, for the better.

Indeed — I think Gelman hits the nail on the head. This is definitely the direction we’re going. We’ve already seen people rolling their own Flash movies, MP3 songs, and so on in support of candidates they like (or even poking fun at them, as with the dance remixes of Howard Dean’s now-infamous Iowa “heeyah”). I challenge you to look at a site like Switch2Dean and tell me that it’s not tantalizing close to Gelman’s vision, and it’s up and running today.

So — go read the article already, it’s worth your time. [Seen on The Scobleizer]

Posted by Jason Lefkowitz at January 23, 2004
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