Well, bloggers seem to at the moment.
For the most part, NPB isn’t much of a SOTU fan. I’ll watch it — with alcohol — read a little analysis here and there and then forget it tomorrow. I’m much more interested in stuff like this. That, at least, tells me something about the state of our union besides “strong.”
The truth is, I actually wanted to comment about the SOTU on a few SoapBlox blogs I was reading this morning. And I couldn’t, because the only account I have is on Daily Kos. And it’s not worth filling out the form, checking my e-mail and verifying the registration, all for a comment.
I totally understand why blogs need account registration — to fight the war on trolls and spammers. But can somebody please come up with a system where my Daily Kos login works on MyDD or RedState (need to tweak you wingers every now and then)? Blogger, Typepad and WordPress all have separate regimes, too. Why not create a portable comment ID that works across all systems?
I think a lot of political folks would participate more in the discussion if we didn’t have to sign up for an account on every damn site* we read.
Programmers, bloggers, entrepreneurs, get to work!
*I have 80 some blogs in my RSS reader.
The omission of New Orleans from the State of the Union address strikes me as emblematic of the whole baffling mess. We have lost a great American city and our collective consciousness seems to be OK with that.
I’m not getting into partisan politics here. Instead, I’m wondering what it is about all of us that accepts how we can talk about the state of our nation, without recommitting to the protection of the lives and communities that have experienced so much loss.
In the recovery, progress is slow, processes are broken and money is not flowing at nearly the pace of what is needed. All those problems can be solved, in large part, by keeping public focus on the direness of the situation. Calling attention to our most urgent challenges is the true purpose of the State of the Union.
It is difficult not to conclude that the reason that we allow the New Orleans crisis to go unmentioned is because of race and economic class. We can talk about donor fatigue or the media’s short attention span or the war in Iraq. I don’t buy it. We have too long a record in American society of bigotry not to face up to a dirty, persistent truth about our subconscious view of New Orleans. We talked about it openly in the wake of the disaster. But now we return to ambivalence, at best, over what to do there, for the same, shameful reason.
It rises above (or should I say, sinks below?) partisan politics. While every current presidential prospect of either party speaks of restoring confidence among Americans, few have decided to keep the drumbeat going for New Orleans. How better to reassure Americans of their families’ security and future, than to take care of those who have already lost hope for both?
Brad Fitzpatrick created OpenID and put it into Livejournal a few years ago. I’ve left comments on all the Livejournal clones with a single account that way. There’s supposed to be a Wordpress Plugin, but I can’t convince anyone to install it so far. Typepad still doesn’t seem to support it, but there’s a Moveable Type plugin and VOX supports it as well. I’ve also read of teams getting close to finishing plugins for Drupal and Joomla.
Thanks for the tip TK.