Looks like Wendy's has a PR problem on its hands. The story hasn't made Google News yet, but it's burning up the blogosphere (over 1300 posts citing "Wendy" and "finger" on Technorati in the last day). Lesson for political operatives of all shapes and stripes: watch the blogs; they're your early warning system....
"Americans broadly and strongly disapprove of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, with sizable majorities saying Congress is overstepping its bounds for political gain," writes ABC News' Gary Langer. "The public, by 63-28 percent, supports the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube, and by a 25-point margin opposes a law mandating federal review of her case. By a lopsided 67-19 percent most think the elected officials trying to keep Schiavo alive are doing so more for political advantage than out of concern for her or for the principles involved." So why is this case suddenly dominating the news? And why is the minority viewpoint winning? Part of the answer rests in the power of a photograph of Schiavo seemingly smiling in response...
I'm at Esther Dyson's PC Forum for the next two-and-a-half days, and will try to blog intermittently as events allow. Right now we're in the middle of an opening panel bringing together three seemingly disparate speakers: -Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, best known for his theory of "multiple intelligences," who made a quiet but impassioned call for the movers and shakers in the room to aim to "do good" now, rather than just focus on making a pile and giving it away later in life. -Andy Stern of the SEIU, perhaps the most tech-savvy of union leaders (see Purple Ocean and his blog), who made an impassioned call for high-tech leaders and labor to find common ground in...
Molly Chapman Norton's recent article about Members of Congress and blogging has an interesting thread going, including Molly's discovery of a list maintained by the National Conference of State Legislators of state reps who blog, and word from one 2006 congressional candidate, Scott Chacon, who is blogging, podcasting many of his posts, and running with a voluntary limit of $100 a contributor (could Joe Trippi be advising him?). While we're on the topic, you can add to the list of politicians who blog: Former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly and Toledo City Councilman Frank Szollosi. Nader's first post is rather dry, which is too bad because he's actually quite a funny guy, and he's got...
The number of blogs is growing by about 40,000 a day, about four times the rate for most of last year, and the total number of blogs is rapidly approaching 8 million, reports brother Dave at Technorati. Most of the growth, he says, "can be attributed to the increase in new, mainstream services such as MSN Spaces, and in increases of use of services like Blogger, AOL Journals, and LiveJournal. In addition, services outside the United States have been taking off, including a number of media sites promoting blogging, such as Le Monde in France." There's also a dark side, he notes, which is the rise of fake blogs whose sole purpose is to artificially inflate the number of links...
MoveOn.org has quietly decided to experiment with a new form of off-line organizing, its Washington director Tom Matzzie tells me, one that readers of Zephyr Teachout's PDF articles will find immediately familiar: to support the formation of ongoing local MoveOn Teams, focused on the group's issue campaigns. At first glance this may not seem to be a big deal, but up until now MoveOn has mostly done "one-off" kinds of local meetings, organizing thousands of house-parties, but not nurturing the institutionalization of continuing connections between MoveOn members in a local area. The rollout of this experiment started Wednesday, with an email to the group's 2 million-plus members opposing "Bush's plan to stack the court." Matzzie tells me that at the 1500+ house...
Glenn Reynolds says that Thomas's speech was "the most cogent argument for the elimination of the FEC" that he's ever heard. Sorry, Glenn, but I disagree about that--we can't go to a system where there are no limits on what an individual can give to a candidate. Elections that are auctions are not free. He's now talking about blogs not as "the new powerbrokers," the topic he was asked to cover, but as "powerbreakers." Nice. Blogs are great at fundraising, he notes, but not at reaching people who don't care. Blogs motivate the motivated. Blogs also are driven by enemies. The newest one, he says, is the FEC. The bankruptcy bill being a similar, but smaller, example. He thinks nobody should be regulated by...
FEC Chair Scott Thomas is speaking now at the IPDI conference lunch, and he's started out by saying how he's here as a "pooper-scooper" to pick up after the "load" of "FECal matter" (his pun) dropped by his esteemed colleague, Bradley Smith. He says that the commission didn't take enough time to distinguish carefully when it adopted a "blunderbuss" exemption for all public communication online, with no distinction between a citizen-volunteer blogger at home and a paid professional with a honed message working in coordination with candidates or parties. Surely there will be some consideration of regulating paid party and corporate/labor political advertising on the Internet, now. On the other extreme, he doubts there will be any interest in touching what volunteers...
