Getting People Offline
Sitting in the Going Offline breakout session. This is a topic that plagues everyone in the online grassroots sector.
The girl from Ron Paul and the girl from John Edwards essentially talked about crowdsourcing. In my opinon, the perfect grassroots team would have one person devoted to blogger outreach and crowdsourcing coordination. That’s where you get the huge numbers mobilizing.
Maven Mom just asked if the Google lounge had bean bags. This year, they have slick white and metal sofas. Well done! You can sit on those. They do look very IKEA-like though. We talk about the web being ubiquitous, but nothing is more ubiquitous than IKEA in the world. They’re in Saudia Arabia now. They also have a candy and nut bar. Kudos to Google.
Between sessions, I managed to score some schwag tshirts. Since I rate conferences on the available schwag, this one is better than last year. No stress balls in the shap of the Capitol Dome or coasters. Blogads gets extra props for having pink t-shirts.
Back to the breakout session:
Are the netroots still relevant? Josh Levy of TechPresident is talking. He’s right, the old model of organized online grassroots activties has changed. We’ve already surpassed the 2004 model. Next year, we’ll be talking about the Obama model, which is the most succesful example of a slick marketing campaign with grassroots outreach. Usually, there’s one or the other. Obama has both.
Oh, legalities with the FEC. The laws are outdated and don’t allow for transparency. However, this forces campaigns to give control to supporters.
Towards the end, someone from the floor mentioned the concept of nettops vs. netroots. What an idea! If the web mimics communication in real life, it makes sense to have a hierarchy of voices on the Internet. This is especially true in the blogosphere.
