I'm at ETech 2004 and spent all of yesterday at a bunch of sessions supposedly dedicated to Digital Democracy.
It was incredibly depressing and insular.
The *success* of the Dean campaign which its (now sacked) Campaign Manager; Joe Trippi described in a remarkably generous (to Dean) keynote as a 'dot com miracle' was it appears; exactly that. In that it raised a lot of money which it then burnt its way through in couple of months with not much to show for it. Actually I'm being harsh and others have already made this point with more eloquence but raising conciousness not dollars was hardly mentioned in 8 hours of panels and ppts.
More thoughtful sessions from the guys behind meetup.com and moveon.org were fine but still failed to talk about politics much beyond the 2004 campaign and issues with Bush.
The best session of the day was a session for veteran political/technology journalists including the excellent Dan Gilmour (who has already seen through a poor keynote that I walked out on to write this). My only regret was that The Guardian's Jack Schofield (sitting in front of me sucking on his unlit pipe) kept his counsel.
Yep a frustrating day probably compounded by the lack of mentions of anything UK. No references to ican, faxyourmp or Tony Blair. Not once.
You can't buy political TV ads in the UK. You'd think someone would have mentioned it.
update: The Guardian: Presidential Race goes Offline - Jim McClellan - Feb 12th.
Recent Comments