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Archive for the 'Tech Blogosphere' Category

Twitter Rapprochement: Personal Democracy Forum vs. Netroots Nation

Published by William Beutler on July 22, 2008 in #pdf2008, Blogs vs. MSM, Charts and Graphs, Democrats, Earned Media, Internet conferences, Netroots, Tech Blogosphere, Technology, Trend Tool, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

While we’re running Twitter mentions of political blog conferences through Flaptor’s Twist, here’s Netroots Nation (#nn08) this weekend with Personal Democracy Forum (#pdf2008) two fortnights ago:

Twitter hashtags #pdf2008 and #nn08 via Twist by Flaptor.

Even at one day fewer (two if you don’t count #nn08’s low-key Sunday) the bipartisan-ish Personal Democracy Forum generated remarkably more Twitter noise than Netroots Nation, and apparently not much less in the rest of Internet news.

Netroots Nation had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivering a speech on the main stage, certain to be covered by political reporters on the beat, but PdF had Arianna Huffington, arguably more Internet-famous than anyone in congressional leadership. The partisan nature of Netroots Nation probably attracted many from the substantial New-Old-New Left netroots movement, more than Personal Democracy Forum’s awkward mix of Obama-emboldened NYC progressives and McCain-indifferent DC conservatives. This despite the minor Twitter scuffle over Huffington’s imperious remarks.

It’s worth noting that NN’s location — Austin, Texas — is the same as SXSW (#sxsw) and its Interactive Festival, the locus of Twitter’s first widespread adoption in March 2007. On the other hand, PdF took place in midtown Manhattan, which by virtue of population and proximity surely has more Twitterinos (also, Tweeps) close by enough to at least tweet about not making it up/down.

But I think the best explanation for PdF’s modest Twitter supremacy is that, like SXSW and unlike NN, the audience it attracts is younger and more reliably tech-oriented. After all, the surveys show that liberal blog readers are older and primarily motivated by politics than the average Valley startup founder. One was first about tech, the other politics.

Meanwhile, the ever more ubiquitous micro-blogging service’s strong showing at the political conference probably bodes well for its long-term mass acceptance.

Assuming Twitter isn’t down, of course.

Portrait of the Smear Artists as an Old Boys’ Club

Published by William Beutler on July 3, 2008 in #pdf2008, Barack Obama, Charts and Graphs, Online Campaigns, Tech Blogosphere, Urban Legends, Web 2.0, Website Design, White House '08 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Example of Obama’s Fight the Smears pageIt’s been a few weeks since Barack Obama’s presidential campaign unveiled its much-discussed Fight the Smears microsite. It’s certainly a daring move, and probably the right one. Although a cardinal rule of politics has long been “don’t repeat the charges against you,” there does reach a point where that no longer holds. John Kerry learned this the hard way, and Obama should get credit for adjusting accordingly.

One aspect I haven’t seen discussed in any great detail is the second page of the website, “Behind the Smears”. It’s not easily found — although it occupies the somewhat prominent last spot in the list of links at left, it’s also buried at the bottom of the page, below the main content and just above the site disclaimers.

The main content of said page is a chart showing the relationships between the accusers, and it looks like this:

Network of Obama “smears”

It’s pretty neat, but it’s also under-designed. After all, it seems to claim that the 1992 Clinton campaign itself is is smearing him, when all it means is that… actually, I’m not sure what it’s saying. What’s more, the lines are too light and don’t convey any specific information about how they are connected. There are a few small revisions which would make it more intuitive: a dotted line for lesser connections, or bigger names for those with more influence.

Relationship mapping is becoming a bigger deal in the blogosphere as more rigorous and even scholarly studies are done about the connections between blogs and attempts are made to quantify the influence one has upon another. This is driven in part by curiosity and in part by my own industry, where marketers are desperate to accurately quantify their impact. One example comes from Linkfluence, as demoed at Personal Democracy Forum this year:

Political blog map via Linkfluence

But how useful is this information? It’s nice to see a representation of the political ’sphere at the macro level. Some insights can certainly be derived therefrom, but it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, it doesn’t necessarily help me to know that one site has linked to another. I need to know why. I need to be able to drill down, and find out how they are arranged by a common link or keyword.

Don’t get me wrong, though: I’m all for pretty pictures.

And while the Obama campaign chart isn’t all that pretty and ultimately not that informative, it’s nevertheless a step in the right direction. The more and better tools a campaign can give to its online supporters, the more investment (in time as well as money) they are likely to make in turn.

Cerf’s Up: When Bipartisanship Really Isn’t

Published by William Beutler on June 30, 2008 in #pdf2008, Al Gore, Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Democrats, Fundraising, Google, Hillary Clinton, Lobbying, Tech Blogosphere, Virginia Politics, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

At last week’s Personal Democracy Forum, one of the events I missed was the launch of a coalition called InternetforEveryone.org. I’m skeptical of the organization, and while I admit I’m not really sure what it’s all about, therein lies part of my skepticism. It’s very easy to agree that Internet access should be as widely available as possible. However, the policy details are not so easily agreed upon. But as a market-oriented thinker, I’m inclined to agree with Erick Erickson that this is in fact a bad idea.

Supporters at the press conference included Stanford professor Larry Lessig, former FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, environmental activist Van Jones, a venture capitalist from the firm which first funded Twitter, Google’s chief evangelist Vint Cerf and Josh Silver from Free Press. That’s the same Josh Silver I criticized back in May for claiming the only real news was his kind of news.

Also on the panel: Republican consultant David All, whom I count as a friend and whose work on Slatecard I admire but with whom I disagree on some matters of policy and partisanship. I’m not the first to note the incongruity of this panel; if you happened to check out the comments at All’s TechRepublican starting this weekend, Mike Turk initiated a very interesting debate with All on the merits of the group continuing through today.

David has called Internet for Everyone a “bipartisan” organization, which Turk has also called into question. All’s claim seems very hard to justify, based on the names above. For one thing, the only other reference to Internet for Everyone as “bi-partisan” comes from Brian Reich at Fast Company — who is, coincidentally, a former Gore campaign aide. Meanwhile Tim Karr of Free Press didn’t bother to include the word “bipartisan” in his announcement at Huffington Post.

But I was reminded of a tweet from @DavidAll the evening the conference ended:

David All tweet about Vint Cerf as a Republican

And in a post on Saturday, All did concede that the bipartisanship of the group was tenuous:

As one of the only Republicans in the coalition (Vint Cerf of Google is a registered Republican), I believe it’s crucial for Republicans to embrace a national broadband strategy.

Curious about Vint Cerf’s Republican bona fides, I decided to punch his name into OpenSecrets.org. For the sake of column width, I’ve removed his employers (principally MCI, MCI Worldcom, Worldcom and Google). Here’s what I found:

Vint Cerf’s political donations, via OpenSecrets.org

Finally! Proof that Vint Cerf is a Republican. Well, maybe he was once a Republican. And so, David’s claim that the Internet was Republican from the beginning has a fighting chance. But Cerf is clearly not a Republican now, in fact he has been quite an active Democrat since approximately the Reagan administration.

There are certainly times when cross-ideological partnerships are a good idea, such as when Redstate’s Mike Krempasky, Adam Bonin and Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos came together to fend off campaign finance restrictions on bloggers. But it concerns me that David All — one of the C&E-recognized rising stars of GOP Washington — is giving ideological cover to an organization which is not just non-conservative and not just un-conservative, but whose basic idea treats limited government and market-based solutions as beneath discussion.

P.S. I hope this doesn’t dissuade him from watching the rest of The Wire.

All the Rage #12: The Neither Tim Russert Nor 3G iPhone Edition

Published by William Beutler on June 15, 2008 in Apple, Entertainment, International, MSNBC, Obituary, Sports, Tech Blogosphere, WikiRage, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Although All the Rage exists as a feature for the purposes of examining the top 10 most-edited articles on the English-language Wikipedia for the week ending Saturday, sometimes it’s almost more interesting what doesn’t make the list. Today we’ll do both:

  1. UEFA Euro 2008 logoArticle: UEFA Euro 2008
    Why: The 2008 UEFA European Football Championship is under way right now in Austria and Switzerland, and at least some English-speaking country must still be alive.
    Detail: Possibly the UK? British subjects (the articles, not the citizens) dominated the top slot for the past month now, and we can assume plenty of them are involved here.

  2. Article: The Incredible Hulk (film)
    Why: It’s the number one movie in America this week.
    Detail: Just as British articles have been landing in the top 5 edited articles for several weeks now, so have the top-grossing U.S. films on their opening weekends.

  3. Article: Kung Fu Panda
    Why: The number one movie in America last week.
    Detail: See above.

  4. Article: Lukas Podolski
    Why: This Polish-born German soccer player made both goals in a 2-0 victory over Poland on June 8. Then he scored the Germans’ only goal in a 2-1 defeat by Croatia.
    Detail: I’m not sure if he’s just really good or Germany is really just not that good. And if you assumed that the German-language Podolski article would be longer than the English one, as I did until just a moment ago, you’d be wrong.

  5. From the Treaty of Lisbon page on WikipediaArticle: Treaty of Lisbon
    Why: This EU treaty, apparently in the works since at least 2001, was rejected this week by Irish voters, thus throwing its future into question.
    Detail: I’d never heard of this treaty once, I’ll admit. But if I wanted to find out more about it, this is probably the best place to find it. I am sincerely impressed by the quality of the article. When I first saw it, I assumed it was a historical subject that had made Featured Article. Well, it’s not — but it should probably be up for Featured Article status. The editors who assembled this page are among Wikipedia’s most sophisticated.

  6. Article: ICarly
    Why: It’s another one of those Nickelodeon “sitcoms” aimed at “tweenagers”, and it’s back on this list after appearing once, in this feature’s second week.
    Detail: Given the target age range for this show noted above, I’m surprised this show is so frequently edited. It can’t be my sisters and their friends; though they’re a precocious wireless generation more advanced than the wired childhood of my generation, I doubt they’re editing Wikipedia just yet. The youngest editors I’ve seen are still a few years older, maybe late middle school. Does this show have an adult following? A few questions I can’t answer: Why hasn’t Hannah Montana been on this list? And do you think SpongeBob SquarePants would have made this list during its heydey?

  7. Article: Deaths in 2008
    Why: The most consistently-ranking Wikipedia article on WikiRage is back after a couple off-weeks.
    Detail: If that’s how you want to put it. Passing this week: Washington’s most respected journalist, Tim Russert, the politician uncle of Rep. Jeff Flake, a 28-year-old Armenian chess grandmaster, by heart attack (perhaps even more tragic than the 58-year-old Russert) and the suicide of a Polish-German footballer (stay happy, Lukas Podolski).

  8. Jurassic Park poster, fair use.Article: Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
    Why: It’s the new Coldplay album, released in Europe last week and available in the United States on Tuesday.
    Detail: They are English, but somehow I doubt that’s it. For one thing, they’re in all those iTunes commercials right now. I’m one of those Radiohead fans who views all Coldplay fans as easily entertained if not actual philistines, but I’ll admit the section played before the Apple logo comes onscreen is catchy.

  9. Article: Jurassic Park (film)
    Why: Front-paged on the English Wikipedia as a Featured Article on June 9.
    Detail: Meanwhile, the article about the novel Jurassic Park “needs additional citations for verifications.” That’s a damn shame.

  10. Article: George I of Great Britain
    Why: The Featured Article on June 11.
    Detail: For the first time this week, the first and last articles on this list concern something British.


  • Holdovers this week: Nothing, actually, for just the second time.

  • Falling off the list: Last week’s list.

  • Recurring themes: British articles of all kinds, American blockbuster films, Featured Articles, I try to be polite when I don’t care about the subject.

  • Tim Russert via queenkv on Flickr.Honorable mention: Tim Russert made it just to #24 according to WikiRage as of Sunday afternoon. That’s fewer than the apparently unintentionally hilarious new M. Night Shyamalan flick, the two-weeks out Adam Sandler vehicle, and a Tamil-language film released in “many theaters.” Hmm.

    • On the other hand, according to Brian Cubbison at the Syracuse Post-Standard, Wikipedia beat the AP to announcing Russert’s death on Friday afternoon. John Robinson at the Greensboro News-Record praises Wikipedia for getting there first. Indeed, if you follow breaking news, you know AP almost never gets beaten on getting there first. Plus, I’m pleased that newspapers have reporter-bloggers following Wikipedia this closely.

    But I’d also like to salute the anonymous first-time editor at 66.187.200.74 in New York City for rolling the page back until the rumors could be verified. As I understand it, MSNBC held back the news until it could notify Russert’s wife, Maureen Orth, and the other TV networks held back until NBC News could break it. Plus, the Verifiability requirement for new information is one of the central tenets of Wikipedia. It’s what keeps the sometimes unreliable website anywhere in the neighborhood of reliable. Wikipedia is supposed to be a research site, and it shouldn’t try to be a news site. I suppose that’s what Wikinews is for, but it hasn’t really caught on.

    I don’t really know what else to say about that, except my best to his friends and family. I’m going to miss the hell out of Russert on “Meet”.

  • One more thing: Notice something missing? How about the 3G iPhone? In fact, this article is at #20 overall at the time of this writing. I’m not sure if it’s counting edits still, because the article has been “merged” with iPhone. The announcement last week was covered heavily by the business and tech press in addition to the Apple and gadget blogs, but on this website full of geeks, that’s as good as it can do? Does this bode ill for Apple and the new iPhone, or does it say something about the type of people who are and are not on Wikipedia? I’ll leave you with that thought.

Image courtesy queenkv on Flickr.

Could Twitter Ads Help Stop Twitter Spam?

Published by William Beutler on May 6, 2008 in Advertising, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 2 Comments

Twitter spam is back on my mind as I think about this morning’s TechCrunch report that Robert Scoble, the #5 most-followed Twitter user, has started tweeting paid advertisements. TechCrunch is shocked, shocked! to find out there’s advertising happening on Twitter, and alludes to speculation that Twitter’s founders will renege on a longstanding promise never to put ads on the Twitter website.

Some of this is driven by the fact that Twitter.jp, the Japanese-language counterpart, launched with advertising last month. Why ads on the Japanese version, but not the English? The conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to put advertising on the site later. That may be true, but of course, we already know that advertising happens on Twitter: many if not most of the accounts listed on TwitterBlacklist.com are primarily commercial in nature.

Which leads me to wonder, could Twitter ads be a partial solution to the problem of Twitter spam? After all, what these people are trying to do is reach many more people than their actual level of notability would attract. In lieu of other options, they’ve followed many more accounts than they could actually read, often using a bot to follow accounts automatically. How many of them would be willing to pay a small amount to place advertisements in the blank space underneath users’ left-hand sidebar? My guess is quite a few. In fact, so would quite a few others not presently engaging in spam-related activity.

One requirement for these ads could be that they must link to a Twitter account, which could then link out to where ever the advertiser wished. According to Valleywag, Twitter.jp ads do this, and it sounds to me like a fine way to keep the advertising conversational, like Twitter is meant to be. You know what isn’t conversational? A self-help guru whose promotions-only account follows 18,265 others with only 472 reciprocal followers.

Twitter advertising of this type would create an alternative to annoying other users with unwanted follower notifications while putting Twitter’s parent company Obvious on the slow road to profitability. Biz, Ev and Jack say they’ve been looking for a business model. Why not this one?

Twitter Spam Gets Political

Published by William Beutler on April 1, 2008 in Hillary Clinton, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0, White House '08 and William Beutler. 6 Comments

Last week, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow asked whether Twitter was facing a spam problem. I said it already does. Ostrow pointed to a Twitter account that seemed to be following far more people than anyone could know, and for purely promotional purposes.

As of today, that account follows (i.e. has friended) 13,000+ Twitterinos, only to tweet links to images of ho-hum abstract artwork. Amazingly, more than 800 people are still following this account. Shortly before reading his post, I found a teenager in Norway who seemed to be doing something similar. While he may in fact be using the service genuinely, he too was following thousands before he’d posted a single tweet. Today he’s following some 3,700+ others, but hasn’t updated for two days, when he was:

watching random crap on youtube :) — Flyaxe on Twitter

Now Twitter spam has taken a turn for the political. On Sunday, CQ’s Eric Pfeiffer told me that his account (which he updates only sporadically) had recently been followed by a horde of obviously fake accounts named for a current or former presidential candidate, plus a number. Most of the notification e-mails he had already deleted, but the others he forwarded to me. They are… interesting. For example, here’s the latest tweet from ChrisDodd53:

Twitter spammer rips off techPresident Daily Digest

I think we can safely assume there are not 52 other Chris Dodds on Twitter. But did you recognize the content of that tweet? I sure did: it was scraped from today’s techPresident Daily Digest. And this pattern is repeated across all the examples of spam accounts he sent my way.

Herewith, a list of these accounts, and a link to the blog whence its latest tweet was scraped:

You know, if these were simply attached to RSS feeds and genuine aggregators of political news, I wouldn’t mind so much. Yes, the aggressive, untargeted following is certainly annoying. But these accounts do not drive traffic to the sites where the words originated. This also makes the creator’s intent all the more inscrutable; they aren’t saying anything, they aren’t promoting anything, and they aren’t updated by hand. The only thing it’s good for, maybe, is souring users on Twitter. But I don’t believe Pownce or Google/Jaiku are really that underhanded. So I remain mystified.

Whatever the cause, this must stop. And it can. Unlike e-mail, which is traded from network to network across yon Internets around the globe, Twitter is administered entirely by Obvious, LLC. They have the same control over the Twitter network as Facebook has over its pages, and it’s within their power to stop it. I’ve previously suggested capping the number of users you can follow, relative to the number of users who are following you. Nothing too restrictive, but something flexible to keep Twitter accounts honest. Jack? Biz? Ev? Little help over here?

In the meantime, there is is already a website carrying the banner against this annoying menace. That’s Stop Twitter Spam, which is currently tracking complaints about spam on Twitter, including my post from last week. The site only barely gets into solutions, and mostly serves to highlight the problem. Most interesting of all is the Twitter Spammer List.

This list includes most of the candidate-based accounts I’ve noted here, and some others I hadn’t. It also mentions the examples from last week, but separates them into two apparent categories of problem Twitter accounts: outright spam and overactive followers. It also notes the number of follows vs. the number of followers and shows the difference as a ratio. The greatest disparity is HillaryClinton5. When the list was last updated, the account followed 2905 others, yet only 25 others followed “her” back. It’s not that HillaryClinton5 has friended the most people — that’s probably the design/art company mentioned above — but that she has the fewest followers. These numbers are a few days out of date, but still give a useful snapshot of the problem.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when Brian Shaler was just following everybody in sight, like it was a game. But then, Shaler is an honest Twitterino. And almost everyone he follows also follows him back.

Twitter Already Has a Spam Problem

Published by William Beutler on March 25, 2008 in Facebook, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Yesterday, Adam Ostrow at Mashable asked, “Is Twitter About to Have a Big Spam Problem?” Well, I wouldn’t yet call it “big,” but the problem is already here. Ostrow wrote:

[L]ately, I’ve been getting an influx of new followers that resemble this character to the right – someone who is following thousands of people, with only a couple hundred following back. In this case, the new follower seems to be a web design studio in Beverly Hills. While I can’t prove it, I have a feeling that this person used a bot to automatically follow me (and a lot of other people) in an effort to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people will simply return the follow – in turn giving this person a new platform to pump their marketing message.

Sidebar to Flyaxe, a suspicious account on TwitterI knew the account he spoke of; I am one of those also being followed by the “Tripix Designs” Twitter account he mentioned. Like Ostrow, I’ve been followed by a handful of these accounts. Aside from inflating my follower count, I didn’t consider it a problem. But this morning I’m convinced.

At right is the sidebar for “Flyaxe” — a Twitter account that added me sometime last night. That’s what it looked like at about 6:30 this morning, Eastern time. Just a couple hours later, Flyaxe is following more than twice as many. Unlike Tripix, it hasn’t even updated once, so it isn’t clearly promotional. Flyaxe appears to be a “19 year-old dude from norway,” as the matching, recent and similarly empty Digg account shows. At least Tripix was honest about its intentions; Flyaxe could be a Trojan horse for just about anything.

The only solution is for Obvious (the under-funded Twitter-makers) to impose restrictions on Twitter accounts. Facebook imposes all kinds of restrictions on its users, and the result is a better experience — at least for those of us who prefer it to MySpace. So let’s say, you cannot follow more than 75% of those following you. Add more followers, and you can follow more people. But we know already that Twitter doesn’t scale well, so anybody following 6,000 people is doing something other than keeping tabs on that many friends. If you want a macro view of Twitter, Twitter tracking exists and so does Tweetscan. The Twitter API and the myriad tools built using it obviate the need to create one account following thousands of other accounts.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to promote something. However, as I’ve written before, Twitter is not especially useful for broad marketing. Thanks to tracking, one could hand-build a targeted list that could be worthwhile for the marketer and the marketed-to. Flyaxe, on the other hand, is wasting my time and his.

Click No Evil

Published by William Beutler on February 19, 2008 in Google, SEO, Tech Blogosphere and Tough Crowd. 1 Comment

Don’t be evil.

I’m sure that on more than one occasion over the past decade, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have wished they’d never committed their company to such a nebulous goal. After all, who gets to decide what’s “evil”? Sure, Google has an extensive corporate conduct policy which aims to do just that. But the real problem is, you’ve just invited everyone to start looking for ways in which you might be, in their eyes, “evil.”

Page and Brin probably never imagined that Harper’s Magazine — once influential on policy and culture but now self-marginalized on the far left — would one day deem them evil for leaving their computers on all night. But maybe they should have, because a new feature in the magazine’s latest edition does pretty much that.

The tech blogosphere paid this article some attention over the holiday weekend, but none of those tracked by Techmeme bothered to scrutinize the article. But Ian Spencer, a friend and fellow former editor of the Oregon Commentator, has.

What follows is a letter he sent to Harper’s. As we figure it will never grace the pages of Harper’s letters page — let alone Google’s search results — he has allowed me to print here:

In light of Ginger Strand’s “Keyword: Evil” article in March 2008 I find it interesting that harpers.org contains code directing a user’s web browser to communicate with Google’s servers every time they visit a page on your site. This service is called Google Analytics, and it enables Harper’s management to easily view site traffic patterns. The supposed costs of “the cloud” must carry less weight than the benefits of website visitor statistics, at least for Harper’s. And if Ms. Strand and Harper’s would like to reduce Google’s electricity usage, they could always tell Google (and other search spiders) to not index their web pages.

There were also a few inaccurate and deceptive statements in the piece. For example, Google’s servers use standard techniques like caching and indexing to reduce the overhead of a single query to just a few megabytes worth of data, not “petabytes” as claimed by Ms. Strand. And the ominous-sounding “tens of billions of CPU cycles” used to process said data is by no means excessive. After all, a computer processor faster than one gigahertz goes through more than ten billion cycles every ten seconds. If you’ve read “Keyword: Evil” on harpers.org you’ve probably used more electricity than Google’s server does when you search for “journalistic integrity.”

But I expect inaccuracies when reading about computers in a non-technical magazine. Far more troubling is the notion that Google is evil simply because they use a lot of electricity. There are plenty of important issues to criticize them on: they have horrible privacy policies and censor users in China, for example. But attacking them for providing an energy-consuming service which Harper’s itself uses was, well, unexpected.

I would just like to add: “Keyword: Evil”? Really? No wonder Harper’s is so antagonistic toward today’s Internet — they’re still on AOL dial-up.

CPAC: I Exit the Room, Romney Exits the Race

Published by William Beutler on February 7, 2008 in CPAC, Metapost, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Tech Blogosphere and Twitter. 0 Comments

I’ve lived in Washington for a good half-decade now, but today is the first time I’ve attended the event that everyone who asks “Where’s the conservative Yearly Kos?” should remind themselves of, CPAC. Luckily for me, this year New Media Strategies secured three-day passes to the event, and even luckier, this year it’s just across the bridge (in Woodley Park) from me (in Adams Morgan). But this is about where my luck ends.

I hopped a cab with the author of CQ’s Ground Game and made it to the Omni Shoreham a little after 10:30. In the Senate Room, I picked up my designer neckwear designating me as a “CO-SPONSOR,” then started looking for the Regency Ballroom in hopes of seeing Vice President Cheney’s 11:00 a.m. speech. I wandered around the labyrinthine Omni Shoreham for fifteen minutes before finally finding a short line leading up to the ballroom. The inertia of said queue informed me that I wasn’t getting in, while the avalanche of Romney signs, placards, stickers, thunder sticks and foam “mitts” informed me that I would see Mitt Romney speak.

That was fine; I was at CPAC to schmooze and even get a little work done between speeches. So I located an aisle seat, ejected my trusty MacBook Pro out of my backpack and sat down to get some typing done. I wasn’t able to get online, however. The free wifi at the Omni wasn’t taking, and AT&T’s EDGE network wasn’t available in the basement. Little did I know, @briandevine, my colleague referenced in the last post, was sending me this Twitterdirect message:

bloggers are saying you have a really good chance of watching Romney drop out at this speech

Alas, I didn’t see it until earlier this evening. And at 1:00 p.m., as Romney’s seemingly generic speech continued, I glanced at my pass schedule to see Mark Steyn was to speak in the Ambassador Ballroom starting now. So I folded up and made for the door in a hurry. At two checkpoints I was told, like the freshmen in Dazed and Confused:

If you leave, you can’t come back.

My response was more polite but no more apprehensive. And after a few more minutes of peripatetic perlplexedness, I realized the Ambassador Ballroom was in fact directly across the hall from the Regency Ballroom, and was the room where I’d spied an overflow crowd watching Romney projected on a large screen.

As soon as I went back upstairs to figure out where to go next, the tweets started flowing. I think the first was from Dave Winer, RSS inventor and not exactly a political blogger:

Romney is withdrawing. Giving speech at conservative group in Washington.

Damn.

Later, I rationalized my foolhardy decision to bolt the ballroom: If I’d seen Romney drop out of the race, I would have witnessed history, of a kind. I was never a supporter — obviously, or I would have remained. Meanwhile, I am a big fan of Steyn’s — his monthly obit feature in The Atlantic was my favorite part of that magazine while it ran.

Skipping out early, on the other hand, gave me a story to tell, and now I’ve told it.

Meg Whitman’s Trial Balloon, Or Mitt Romney’s?

Published by William Beutler on January 28, 2008 in California Governor, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Tech Blogosphere and White House '08. 3 Comments

Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, released to the web on the evening of Jan. 25, outlined recent developments that could propel retiring eBay CEO Meg Whitman into the Republican primary to succeed term-limited Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010:

As she prepares to depart from EBay after a decade at the helm, Chief Executive Meg Whitman appears to be investigating a new career — in politics.

eBay logo smallWhitman has talked with top Republicans about the possibility of a run for California governor in 2010, according to three operatives who have had discussions with her. Whitman is said to be asking detailed questions about the logistics of a run and the effect she could have as governor, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal the conversations. …

The source close to Whitman, however, downplayed the seriousness of the conversations, saying that Whitman was still new to politics and that California Republicans, not Whitman, were the ones driving the discussion.

“This thing has come to her,” the source said. “She hasn’t given it all that much thought. It’s not, ‘I’m going to run. Give me a game plan.’”

The tech blogs reacted quickly, and with enthusiasm. Valleywag went with “eBay ex-CEO considers run for California governor” and Mashable asked: “Could Meg Whitman Be The Next Governator?”

It only took another few hours before Mashable returned to the subject with “Meg Whitman NOT Running For Governor, After All.” Valleywag, whose reporting claims to knock down this rumor, this time floated another: “Meg Whitman quashes governor rumor, but could she serve under Romney?”

So that’s what this is all about! is what I first thought upon reading this. Now, if you think I’ve been holding back mention of Whitman’s role as a finance co-chair for the Romney campaign on purpose, you’re right. I have no evidence, let alone proof, that this story was pushed on the LAT by Romney’s camp. But I’m thinking it.

Meg Whitman, Mitt RomneyeBay is one of the few survivors of the dot-com era, one of the great business success stories of the Internet, and Whitman has been on board since it went public in 1998. Before that, she worked with Mitt Romney at Bain & Company. Her professional credentials make her “supremely well qualified” for the job, quoth Henry Blodget, and in fact this is something she has in common with Romney.

Her Republican credentials, however, are thin. The Times reports she only recently changed her party registration from “decline to state” to GOP, and Whitman’s politics are assumed to be moderate. Very possibly she is too moderate for the California GOP, especially one annoyed by Schwarzenegger’s “post-partisan” policies, but then Tom McClintock is probably too conservative for the state. This reminds one of Romney as well, although in a less salutory manner. Romney has been a Republican since 1994 at the very least, but if we believe him that he was an “independent during Reagan-Bush,” not much longer than that.

Now, the California primary arrives on Feb. 5, and the RealClearPolitics polling average puts Romney in solid second place, albeit solidly behind John McCain. Whitman is fairly popular in the Valley, as the blogs cited above indicate. If she is considering a run for governor, that could reflect well on Romney. (I’m undecided whether to trust Valleywag’s reporting; other news outlets have yet to follow suit, but the life cycle of a trial balloon is usually longer than 24 hours, so we’ll see.) If she is not considering a run, then even better! If you’re in the California primary, this is just the time to float the idea of a respected Bay Area businesswoman as a member of your cabinet.

Or if she ran for governor and won, Whitman could be the first of what one might eventually have to call “Romney Republicans.” It’s obviously way too early to seriously start talking about such a thing — but do you really suppose that Romney’s supporters haven’t already?