Well, Zacker and I are waiting to get on the flight back to the Bay. Thought maybe I could do a little preliminary digestion of the weekend.
Face Time
For online communities, getting face time is very important. Because the internet (and especially text-heavy blogs) is a depersonalizing medium, it's easy to be kind of crude or snide or mean or thoughtless. Much easier than in real life. Building strong online communities means getting over that hump. There will always be trolls and troublemakers and breakdowns and bad days, but building a core of people who actually treat one another with respect is critical.
Meeting up in real life is a great way to do this. It was kind of cute to watch people "de-lurk" and reveal their nom d'blog and get a couple whistles or claps from a crowd. Zack reminded me on poolside Sunday of the great David Weinberger quotation, "everyone is faimous for 15 people." Seemed apt.
Probably the best contact I made was Scott Goodstein, who I've done work with before via phone/IM while I was at MFA (he does the press/DC stuff for PunkVoter). We lost a bunch of money at the same blackjack table and were part of the "still here" caucus
Blog Celebrities
That being said, there's certainly an A-list. I've met a lot of these people before (and a few of them even remember me, flatteringly), so I'm pretty much over it. Since I don't really have anything important to say I leave them alone. I did make a point of shaking hands with Glenn Greenwald and Prof. PZ Myers to encouage their work and just to say that I had.
I think the Weinberger paradigm from above may be generational. This is a massive over-generalization, but aside from axe-grinders I think the more grown-up unknowns tend to be more highly defferential than the younger types. One of the defining characteristics of our generation (I believe) is a comfortability in dealing with people "above our station in life" as equals.
Blogger Panels Are Mostly Pointless
A panel discussion with bloggers are kind of redundant. Unless you're going to unveil something new (e.g. the panel where the netroots survey was dissected), or have a few people who disagree face off, there's not much point to me sitting there listening to people I read. They're not gonna tell me anything I don't already know, and the main practical effect is to drive the celebrityesque blogger/commenter (or panelist/questioner) dynamic.
Hopefully future events will feature more outcome-oriented work, workshops and roundtables as well as lesser-known bloggers who might have surprising things to say.
Bling Bling
Markos and most others are defending Mark Warner's bash at the Stratosphere, as they should. It's a key part of what they're trying to do in terms of mainstreaming and legitimizing their work, and that's important. For my part, I still think it could have been a bit better conceived. Like I said, it was kind of fun, but I think there's something wrong when a candidate blows six figures on a party with ice sculptures, and Kos puts up a paypal link to get Gina Cooper (who did all the organizing for the whole MF conference) some kind of compensation.
As for whether he was trying to buy support, it's hard to see how he wasn't; if not support, than attention. This isn't really a bad thing, and it was fun, but I think if someone really wants to get bloggers, they're better off being liberal with information and access rather than the pocketbook. There were some invite-only "meet and greets" I heard, but that sort of feels weird too.
Anyway, it's not bad or wrong, but the whole thing was slightly incongruous to me. We're all talking about it, so in that respect it was a big success, but I would have liked to see a more creative use of the fundage (and maybe not "the blues brothers" as the house band).
The Kids
One of the things I was most interested to see was what sort of people from my generation were there. I have to admit, this was a little disappointing (if not unexpectedly so). Bloggers and blog-readers on the political side are overwhelmingly over the age of 30. Most of the youngsters there were people I already knew, or was one degree of separation away from. There was one knot of three hipsters who I wasn't familiar with, but sadly I didn't get a chance to talk to them.
However, I've got great hopes for our ability to organize and network quickly in an ad-hoc fashion. This only reinforces in my mind the necessity for creation for-us/by-us space online for organizing our generation. We're overwhelmingly online and mostly progressive. Let's make it happen.
On that note as well, one of the things I've seen from numbers before and was brought to mind again by the Skyline's presentation on the potential of the Millenial Generation, is that most White Males are still voting Republican. Maybe I should try to do something about that.
Ok... Time to get on board the airplane. Maybe more later.
