Dana Blankenhorn

More on Webnut Welfare

When I wrote my post on Webnut Welfare yesterday, I did not realize that author Matt Stoller had the answer staring him in the face.

UPDATE: MyDD has begun taking baby steps in the direction I suggest below.

But Stoller's MyDD co-host, Chris Bowers (left), (Jerome Armstrong is the third member of that trio) estimates that members of Moveon.org, the largest Netroots political organization, contributed as much as $300 million during the last election cycle.  He quotes a study from the Center for Public Integrity indicating that most of that money went to consultants, specifically consultants with contempt for the netroots.

This is not the only sign of Netroots disquiet. Markos Moulitsas calls Hillary Clinton's claim of Netroots support a sham, concluding "her campaign has taken to misrepresenting online sentiment for the benefit of traditional media reporters who don't know any better."

This is the perfect time in the electoral cycle for such a discussion. Despite the bleatings of cable news, the campaign has barely started. Sorting out now who should profit from activism created in the Netroots is a discussion well worth having, before members of this group find themselves digging deep for another two years to support what they consider their enemies within the party.
Not everyone agrees, but this particular dissenter, Oliver Willis, is a Washingtonian through-and-through, complete with girth, a taste for thin women, and a rabid love for the Washington Redskins.

But Willis is far from alone. Max Sawicky calls Netroots activists suckers. "The "Internet Left" is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party," he writes, comparing them with the McGovern wing of the party in the late 1960s.

This Week's Clue: Promises Gone Missing

The following should be called Vo. 11, No. V of a-clue.com, my free weekly e-mail newsletter. Enjoy.

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Where does e-commerce stand, 13 years after the Web was spun? (Picture from SercomGroup.)

I date the beginning from 1994 because that's when I first started covering the field, at the old Interactive Age Daily.

The promise was e-commerce could cut costs by eliminating middlemen, and expand choices by making one-off merchandise profitable.

In some ways this has been achieved. Middlemen have been eliminated. E-commerce has marched like a locust swarm through the travel market, the video market, the music market, the book market. But the savings have mainly been pocketed by new, larger merchants based far away (Amazon) or re-captured by the sellers who treated the Web as the middleman (Southwest Air).

The Long Tail does a better job than I have in detailing how choices are expanded through the Web.  Sites like eBay are great for one-off goods, bringing the maximum number of buyers in, killing another traditional market (auction houses) in the process.

But in terms of technology we could be much, much further along than we are. Internet-based systems let you manage demand from the point of supply and it has been traditional merchants, like Wal-Mart, not online merchants, who have taken advantage. As a result rather than promoting diversity and local provisioning Internet technology has actually promoted the opposite, sameness and foreign provisioning. So far.

What are the two key factors slowing Internet commerce in 2007? It comes down to two words.

The Bell Grizzlies

A new study is out from Heavy Reading which tells us all you need to know about what the Bells plan to do with their new market power.

Sports.

No really, sports. These idiots think that sports are their ticket to integrated multimedia success. (Stop laughing...OK, I'll wait...)

Basically they figure that since they "control" a lot of "end-user service platforms" (cable, phone, Internet, cellular) they are in a unique position to profit from Americans' insatiable appetite for sports stuff.

No, seriously. They think they're going to work with their equipment suppliers (Cisco) to deliver the same LeBron James dunk through all sorts of wired and wireless channels, and you'll sit there enthralled enough to pay-and-pay for every view of it.

Webnut Welfare

In a recent post at MyDD, Matt Stoller brings up the sad plight of Lane Hudson (left).

Never heard of him? He's just just the guy who brought down Mark Foley is all, and with him the Republican House. He did it through a blog called Stop Sex Predators, where he detailed something most "in the know" in Washington already knew -- that the author of the Internet Predator Law was, himself, a sexual predator, on the make for teenage boys, specifically, House pages.

When he began this work, Hudson was with the Human Rights Campaign, a pro-gay lobby. For his troubles they fired him. He is now unemployed and hard-up to pay his rent. Writes Stoller:

Lane is a hero and a leader, but he's being treated as refuse.  Think about this for a second.  The incentive baked into the cake if you are a progressive activist or Democrat is that under no circumstances here should you ever take a public risk; you'll sully your name and no one will help you.  Is it any wonder we have a party lacking leadership and built on caution?

Which leads us to a discussion of political business models.

It's the Process, Stupid

Unlike the conservative movement of the 1960s, Open Source Politics is a process revolution, not an ideological one.

What matters is not such the destination as the way we proceed toward it. Forcefully, an open source approach of sharing from the bottom-up. Using Internet values.

This is often lost on the Media, which lacks the institutional memory to conceive of anything but a left-right split. It's always lost on the Right, because it is completely outside of their experience.

This point was brought home forcefully by last night's star attraction, Senator Jim Webb.

As Markos of DailyKos rightly points out, Webb from the beginning was a Netroots candidate. He had to be persuaded to run. His stands were often to the right of the establishment Democrats' choice, Harris Miller.

Yet the Netroots supported Webb avidly. Why?

Why Righty Blogs Don't Work

It's simple open source economics.

At the very heart of the Internet economy is something called the economics of abundance.  (The Long Tail has long specialized in coverage of this area.)

Because of the Internet, there are more sellers than buyers. Sellers don't need intermediaries to find their prospects, because the Internet does that for free. It's buyers who need intermediaries, people (or software) who pick through the virtual bins and offer them good choices.  Buyers can now get exactly what they want, and no longer need to accept what's on the shelf.

The Internet, by its nature, turns traditional economics, and economic relationships, on their head. Ever since the first market stalls set themselves up in Ur (near present day Baghdad) it has been supply that was constrained, not demand. It was the sellers who used intermediaries, not buyers. Sellers developed many types of intermediaries, and buyers would have to pay for these services to find what they wanted.

But now it's buyer's intermediaries who rule.

Google is a buyer's intermediary. eBay is a buyer's intermediary. MySpace is a buyer's intermediary.

Open source takes advantage of this fact.  Costs are shared among all willing participants, and software grows organically.  So too can content, as at Wikipedia. 

Now, what does this have to do with politics and political blogs?

Everything, which is why this book I'm working on has the working title of Open Source Politics.

Less Telecomm Talk, More AntiTrust Action

David Brin has a great post up about how cellular operators can make their networks useful in the case of a Katrina-like disaster that takes down their towers. He liked it so much he cross-posted to DailyKos, the Democratic political community.

The idea is simple. When the towers are down, let phones send SMS text to other phones, without going through the tower. Now the tower (and its attendant back-end) handles billing, but we're talking about situations where the tower is down.

It should be a no-brainer.

But Brin has been banging on this drum for months now, and there has been no response from the oligopoly. Most pointedly there has been no response from the duopolists, AT&T and Verizon, who between them control most of the phone market as well as the U.S. cellular market.

This is an important moment, and it's vital that we understand it. Once you have a monopoly, or a duopoly, the only weapon you have left to force change is talk. People can talk, and government can talk louder, but at the end of the day, if the monopolist chooses to fight, even the government may find itself impotent.

We're All Dean-ites Now

We are approaching an interesting anniversary.

On March 15 it will be 4 years since Howard Dean stepped before the California Democratic convention and gave his "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" speech.

It holds up fairly well. In some sections, extraordinarily well. But what is most remarkable about it is how it has since been accepted by nearly all Democrats.

• Every major Democrat is now against the War in Iraq.
• Every major Democrat is now for expanding health insurance.
• Every major Democrat now talks about increasing the youth vote.
• Every major Democrat now opposes Bush's education policy.

Dean's approval of civil unions now draws majority support. His call for expanding wilderness is now considered Democratic kant. And, of course, his ideas about using the Web and rebuilding the Democratic grassroots now have Republicans on the run across the country -- even in parts of the South.

Few Presidents have succeeded in moving politics this sort of distance in so short a time. Barry Goldwater is comparable, but movement conservatism did not have the same hold on the Republican Party in 1967 that Dean's stands do among Democrats today.

Four years ago Howard Dean was considered a "left-wing" and "fringe" candidate, even within his own party. Now he is the party's chairman, and its candidates all echo his themes. Why else would Hillary Clinton announce her candidacy online -- that's the netroots effect.

Porn's Changing Role in Tech

Sad, but true. The first industry to get hold of and make money from most technologies is the porn industry.

When you have high-income buyers ready to pay big for what they want, you have a business model that can't be beat. True for porn, true for gambling. While many "early adopters" are geeks who will embrace a technology for its own sake, porn customers are goal-oriented.

So it was porn that pioneered the business model for videotape, porn that pioneered the 900 number, porn that pioneered the DVD and the paid Web site. Attempts to outlaw porn merely act as taxes on this market, just as in every other area.

Now porn is looking at higher capacity DVDs, where there is an ongoing format war between Sony's Blu-Ray and the HD-DVD standard. Sony says it won't sell to pornographers.  Does this mean HD-DVD will sweep the field?

The Real Katrina Fallout

There was a New York Times story published yesterday that, frankly, disgusted me.

It's a 30,000 foot story about New Orleans. The city is not coming back. The story implies this is a good thing. The author spoke to economists and demographers and delivered a dry piece without the taste or smell of humanity to it.

But that's not the real story of Katrina. The real story of that storm, and the other 2005 hurricanes, is just now starting to be felt up-and-down the East Coast.

Our coasts have become uninsurable. The MSNBC story linked above focuses on Cape Cod, but the real epicenter of this is Florida. Homeowners are demanding a government subsidy of their risks. Republicans in Florida are complying, increasing the size of the state's insurance pool, even at the risk of giving more power to Democratic CFO Alex Sink.