If Dean is Netscape, is Bush AOL?
: Dave Winer spent last night at Dean’s HQ and translates the mood:
A few minutes before in a staff meeting (I couldn’t attend), there was such yelling and cheering, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. If this is Netscape, they aren’t blinking and Microsoft hasn’t attacked yet (that comes tonight). There is bewilderment, and while they are very young, they are tired, having run a long race and still challenged to work even harder.
: Dean adviser David Weinberger is ever the class act.
: UPDATE: Dave Winer posts more from his experience at HQ as he worked on the Dean Channel. He hit the wall — that is the wall between church and state, between editorial and business, between news and advocacy. Fascinating:
Ed Cone: “A visitor to this blog joked last night that maybe Channel Dean had been cancelled. But the fact is that other campaigns would be wise to put a similar news aggregation service into use as soon as possible.”
The hardest part isn’t the technology, not by a mile. It was a tough night at Dean HQ. We hit an impasse when Howard Dean, on CNN, said “We came in third.” He said it very clearly and unambiguously, so I opened the editorial page and typed in the quote and clicked Submit. I thought the candidate had said something very weblike. At this moment no one had said it. Not Larry King, not Wolfe Blitzer, they had qualified the statement, where Dean acknowledged it.
My post caused quite a stir in the Web bullpen and the post came down. At that point we all stopped posting. So Ed’s commenter got it right. The show was cancelled last night. But in the morning light, the chance to open up the political process to the rare honesty of the Dean candidate, something the Dean workers had trouble accepting, was too good to pass up.
When I post on the Dean Channel I know I accept some compromises on my editorial freedom. That’s why having Scripting News is so important. It’s a bootstrap and there are always glitches in bootstraps. So last night Channel Dean went off the air briefly. This morning it’s back.
