Technorati's pairing with CNN to cover the Democratic convention is a sign of the times. Tools for “mass listening” like Technorati are key to a new era of politics.
Technorati enables the discovery of blog conversations in close to real time -- so convention watchers will be able to tune in to public conversation, around the US and around the world.
Mass listening tools can provide a richer perspective than polling, which captures answers to loaded, pre-defined questions.
One of the challenges faced by the Dean campaign was listening to the voices of the thousands of citizens active in the blogs and forums. When Joe Trippi was asked at the 2004 O’Reilly Etech conference about using the input from the online Deaniacs, Trippi talked about the big red bat that was used to measure campaign contributions. He didn’t mention ideas or policy proposals.
This wasn't just cynicism on Trippi's part. There weren't good ways to hear what thousands of people were talking about. With so many more citizens using blogs in public conversation, citizens and politicians need new ways to tune into the distributed conversation.
The second half of the 20th century was the era of "mass broadcasting" -- a few anchors spoke, and the rest of us listing. The first half of the 21st century is about "mass listening" -- more of us participating in public conversation, using new tools to discover those conversations, catalyze opinion-forming and political action.
Here's a brief outline of some of the more popular "tools for mass listening"
• Technorati is a weblog search engine that reveals which weblogs link to a given blog or write about a topic
• Feedster searches RSS feeds to discover and aggregate conversations.
• Daypop and Blogdex show the top news articles mentioned in weblogs. These tools give a quick check of the “zeitgeist”, showing what masses of bloggers think about the news of the day.
Note: I discovered the phrase in a paper by Elisabeth Richard of Canadian Policy Research Networks.
Posted by alevin at July 23, 2004 09:59 AM | TrackBack