profitlabinc.com

QUESTION:

Do you think the Blogosphere, as it is today, could influence a national Election?

Don’t answer too fast.

Yeah, so do I.

Allow me to introduce you to DOTXXBLOG, or as I dubbed it at launch: An Early Experiment in Networked Politics. I created it simply because I care about the issue and because I was curious what effect I might achieve using a blog as a political weapon.

It still feels a little silly rolling off my lips, too — — BLOG = Political Weapon.

Yet, there it is… undeniable.

I won’t waste your precious attention on another long exploration of how little we anticipated these developments, how incredible it is that — here we are — at full gallop AGAIN, because the technology is literally exploding in our very hands, even as we are trying to fashion weapons from it. Let’s just consider that preface digested.

For a background on the .XXX top-level domain, there’s no better place for a balanced nutshell, with both sides fairly represented — both pro-XXX and con-XXX, than the DOTXXXBLOG site itself. That’s one of the needs I wanted to address. As important as this issue is, I was aghast at how little engagement there was between the sides — directly, not by way of court filings and petitions, but in the same room working towards resolution. There was no formality nor indication that anyone was trying to create some.

I became frustrated.

On one side, there was the daily adult webmaster board chest-beating and First Amendment sermonizing.

On the other side, well who the hell knew WHAT they were doing on the other side. From where I was sitting, though, ICM looked pretty buttoned-down and shit-together. Jason Hendeles did a fair enough job, giving a cautious but confirmed response on DOTXXXBLOG. Though we had never met, nor spoken at all, he trusted me to do the right thing and to hold up with action the ideals I had claimed in all my rhetoric.

I stand with my friends, but it was pretty embarrassing to consider the mismatch — at least as regards facades. They spent their days inaugurating national ISPs and negotiating photo opps. with heads of state. And, to judge from the pictures of the porn industry most people see (and the porn industry still seems proud to disseminate) — well, let’s just say, it would be hard to imagine any politician with duty to a spectrum of viewpoints standing behind us. Image cultivation was never anything pornographers had had to trouble with before. For most of the industry’s history, getting out of sight, rather than visible, has been the smart move.

That changed and, alas, too quickly. The desert island of porn had become cozy. The “players” of the industry, as it were, must have felt they would lose more by acknowledging the constable at the door than by wadding cotton in their ears.

Here again we are at a lull in the activity. I’m sure ICM and ICANN are getting ready.

What is the porn industry doing? I’m not going to accept anything with the word “petition” in it as an answer.

For bloggers in other industries that may intersect with conventional politics and the law in other ways — like meat processing, for example — I would say the central lesson of my exercise is…

A BLOG IS BOTH A VOTE AND A VOTING BOOTH

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washington | politics | free speech| icann | .xxx | domain | censorship | blogging | marketing

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2005 at 1:09 pm and is filed under the media, blogging, PR and the blog, blog politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.