Ed Cone on The Election

While the main room was fairly full for Ed Cone’s BloggerCon Election session, I was surprised it wasn’t ‘standing room only.’ Given that this crowd is far more left than right, perhaps people wanted to avoid the feelings of denial, anger and frustration all over again.

To make our discussion more productive, Cone encourages us to focus on what went wrong and what we did right. He refers us to one of his recent articles on Web Politics 2.0, and talks about the importance of making significant change at a local level.

Someone raises their hand and says, “They seemed to be talking at us instead of having a conversation.”

Despite the seachange effect of the Dean campaign, email, not blogging, was still the most effective tool of the campaign.

So, what should the role of blogging be and what can we do to make it instrumental and more sustainable? Clearly, if the blogger becomes more important than the candidate himself, then it becomes a problem.

A blogger is just an amplifier for a message says Robert Scoble.

In the corporate world, we’re arguing the same thing. Should we allow stars to emerge from Microsoft, Sun or Google? These “stars” are being pulled into conversations at the deepest levels.

Ed Cone responds, “this is the power of the local blog in politics.” That poses the question “does it mean that blogging doesn’t scale beyond a certain level?

Jay Rosen says, “We have to get politicans at the highest level to blog themselves. Let’s get someone to try it.” The problem is that politicians don’t have the time because their focus has been and continues to be on fundraising. “Once a candidate really blogs and its really them, they’ll realize that blogging IS fundraising,” says Rosen.

Yet, email remains the most powerful tool.

Larry Lessig, who sits in the back of the room, invited politicians to post on his blog. “One of the reasons it was so difficult was how hard it was to effectively persuade people on the other side,” said Lessig. “The great hope of blogs was a way to get around this – blogs become these small circles who listen to the people they’re talking to opposed to a space where people can talk across groups.”

When we only had broadcasting, we had to hear things we didn’t always want to hear. In villages, there’s a cross pollination of ideas which makes it easier to get to another side of the issue.

The blogosphere’s power is that it is so de-centralized. We have the ability to make lasting change here.

Ed Cone asks Lessig what we should be looking at and doing in 2005 and 2006?

Lessig responds, “We have a great network but it just doesn’t work. They talk about it among themselves but these issues are not getting to the right people. How do we take this powerful machine that we have amongst us and get the right tools into the right people’s hands. This is something I think about every day.”

Lessig is aggressively working on this now with Civic Space Labs.

Then the corner turned significantly.

Bob Cox from the National Debate, who’s an Independent but voted for Bush, raised his hand and said, “It seems to me, that in the context of this discussion, its all self referencial. If blogs had blogged for themselves, we would have won. I don’t think that’s the right discussion. Only half the country is represented here.”

Indeed. But there are as many Republican bloggers as there are Democrats according to Chris Nolan.

Back to Cone’s point. Let’s look at some prime local success stories and use the power of the blogosphere to effect things here. Then, we can scale it accordingly as we learn what works and what doesn’t. Ah yes, the start of another long four years.