I ran into the Great Orange Satan himself (pictured) yesterday in the early evening, and he was at pains to point out that the YearlyKos Convention has only a loose association with the DailyKos blog (YearlyKos Executive Director Gina Cooper is also a DailyKos fellos) and nothing in particular to do with Markos himself.
Indeed, it's not even totally clear to me that's there's an especially logical or organic connection to bloggers and blogging in play here. Obviously, that's the causal origin of the gathering. But bloggers are interested in the issues, and an awful lot of what's going on here is just around issues -- foreign policy, telecom policy, education, church/state issues, whatever -- issues that activists care about whether on- or off-line. It seems to me that this confab is probably going to evolve over time in a more generic direction and be something like an inverse CPAC rather than something closely linked with a particular subculture.
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Heads in the Sand
Well, for people who are interested in this sort of thing, blogs stopped being interesting just for their mere existence a while ago. Yep, they allow you to write about lots of stuff, in real time, and hear feedback. But we're all familiar with that now. You couldn't write a breathless book called "Blog!" now, any more than you could write "The Radio!" or "The Electricity-Powered Home!"
I guess there's a few panel discussions to be had about group blogging vs. blogging for a larger institution vs. individual blogging, and how blogs influence the wider world, and how what unites and divides Left Blogistan.
But blogs are neat because they allow you to learn about and discuss interesting stuff, so it's not surprising that the content is what people want to discuss.
Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | August 3, 2007 9:02 AM