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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 15:41:46 -0400 From: Martin Kearns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: THE ADVOCACY LINK -->FACTCHECK: IPODS: DAN RATHER: DEL.ICIO.US To: Steven Clift <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Organization: Green Media Toolshed ****************************** THE ADVOCACY LINK ****************************** Welcome to The Advocacy Link, a feed from the frontier of network-centric thinking and a stream of personal riffs to stimulate debate about advocacy strategies in the age of connectivity. Included: * Fighting as a Network: Cheney and Factcheck.com * The Killer App: Advocacy Applications & Tools: Ipodder * Lessons from Dan Rather * Find the Link: Del.icio.us * Terms for the Net-Gen: SPIM Additional related content can be found at Green Media Toolshed: http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org Send Flames, Feedback and Ideas to Explore to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ******************************* FIGHTING AS A NETWORK - FACTCHECK.COM ****************************** Here is a great example of network-centric advocacy in action. How hard is it to inject opinion into a Vice Presidential debate? You may have listened to the Vice Presidential debates. It was surprising to hear Dick Cheney respond to the Hallibuton attacks with "(Edwards and Kerry) know the charges are false. They know that if you go, for example, to www.factcheck.com, an independent Web site sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, you can get the specific details with respect to Halliburton." Unfortunately, Dick probably wanted to point people to www.factcheck.org. Does it matter? Well, it does when you are fighting a network. A loosely organized network can seize opportunities very quickly.... the real owner of the domian pointed traffic at a George Soros site within minutes of the gaffe. The site pointed it to a site with the headline "Why We Must Not Re-Elect President Bush". (50,000 hits in the first hour.) THE KILLER APP - ADVOCACY APPLICATIONS AND TOOLS ****************************** IPODS AND IPODDER Millions of Ipods are being sold in the US (http://www.apple.com/ipod/). Ipods and digital music players are the hot items of today's trend setters ($54 billion in sales projected for 2005). Did you know that these 40 gig (that's a LOT of memory) portable music hard drives could also be a valuable asset in the campaigns you are planning for next year? IPODDER (http://www.ipodder.org) allows people with Ipods to monitor the web for audio content. Ipodder moves the content from the web onto your portable hard drive and allows you to subscribe to "feeds" of mp3 recordings. In addition to music, Ipods could be used as a TOOL FOR ACTIVISTS that need to catch up on the issues, listen to important training, listen into conference calls, hear inspirational speeches or even listen to news and text converted to audio. Are your campaigns capturing the valuable audio content that volunteers, donors and activists need to hear tomorrow? Think of it as radio without the tower. How could you use a station that reaches a few million people? What would you broadcast to your core working team? LESSONS FROM DAN RATHER ****************************** Dan Rather and CBS news were "taken out" for the story about Bush's military record by a loosely organized but synchronized network of bloggers and savvy political strategists who turned a mistake into a media frenzy. The first lesson for advocacy groups is the VALUE OF MEMBER-TO-MEMBER discussion. Technology is being used by tightly woven communities to challenge authority (in this case CBS). The second lesson concerns distributed message strategies that SATURATE MANY SITES WITH THE SAME MESSAGE (vs. the old central site strategy), resulting in complete control of the framing of the story and its outcome. This effective campaign against CBS illustrates the way the connectivity of today's culture challenges models of conformity and acquiescence to power. If you bear with me for a slight detour to academia, many interesting experiments (http://www.age-of-the- sage.org/psychology/social/asch_conformity.html ) from 1958 onward demonstrate the power of conformity and dissent. In the experiment, several paid staff suggest that lines on a paper are of the same length even though the lines are different. The subject of the experiment is asked for an opinion. 74% of the time the subject of the experiment will go along with the crowd declaring that the lines which are not the same are of the same length. However, if just one other person declares the lines are different the ratio changes to 82% of the volunteer subjects identifying correctly that there is difference in the line length. Today, online communities of thousands of members give voice and volume to anyone who doubts the presentation of the dominate group. Online communities help those that detect problems raise doubts anonymously and bolsters those that are willing to stand up behind a conviction. (According to the LA Times - ?Buckhead? the blogger which broke the forgery is also the same guy that filed suit against Clinton in 1998 to disbar him from practicing law because of purgery). In the case against CBS, other blog posters chimed in with collaborative facts while others forwarded the post within minutes to other boards and media outlets. The point is not who broke the story against CBS (mastermind or not) -- it is the way that the story leaked as a pulse from an underground network within 12 hours to challenge CBS news within its 24-hour media news cycle. The second key learning opportunity from the CBS story is the importance of MESSAGE VOLUME. Using a network-centric approach, messages can "saturate" the public arena and discussion space to frame a debate in a new way. After the CBS mistake, the heart of the story (politician admits passing Bush, Bush fails to complete Guard obligations in MA) was swept under the rug in a synchronized cyclone of response. William Safire's "discredited memos," Fox, O'Reilly and 300,000+ Google results have swamped out most discussion of the core story. Additionally, the tempo ramped up to smear all media. (Salon, a Republican PR firm that is also involved with the Swift Boat smear, was engaged in driving this story.) The point of the media smear is to "prove" by swamping out the retractions and any investigation that the core right should dismiss stories from the "mainstream" press or any authority figure that previously might be thought of as "responsible." The general public will be on to a new topic by the time CBS regains control of the issue. Conclusions are buried and hundreds of thousands of pages will leave the discredited CBS hanging in cyberspace. In the age of connectivity, a fight for web dominance focuses on campaigns that spread key messages and opinions to most sites and ultimately the most popular places on the web. The campaign that dominates the web will win in framing language and swamping out oppositions online strategy. In the new fight for web dominance the tactics are sharing, copying, pasting and linking messages not brand or message control. So open up your content?encourage anyone in your campaign network to republish content on other sites, blogs, community boards, listserves in any brand with any variation of edits. FIND THE LINK ****************************** And just for something completely different? http://Del.icio.us an online tool for keeping your favorite websites and bookmarks. I strongly recommend that people working on progressive change set up an account. The site is easy to use. It allows anyone to set up an account for free. It encourages you to add a little link to your browser so that you can quickly add pointers to favorite web pages to your online account. It is worth doing because it will ENABLE A COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE TO BUILD "SURFING" CAPACITY on an issue very quickly. Once you add a site to del.icio.us you can connect to the other people that added that site. You can see what sites they added to their Del.icio.us and you can subscribe to RSS to monitor when they add links to their account. Once you play with it for a bit, you will start to realize the value of collaborative bookmarking is collaborative learning and accelerated capture of expertise. TERMS FOR THE NET-GEN ****************************** NET-GEN ? The generation that has grown up (12-24 year olds) using the Internet regularly. The Internet and use of electronic communications has become a defining characteristic of the group. BLOGs and BLOGGERS - A "blog" is a tool for publishing content online. These tools have made it as easy to publish content almost as easy as sending an email. The style of blogging is more ?email like? or more informal and personal. A blog is the online site where you can read this content. A blogger is anyone that publishes a blog regularly. I, Marty Kearns, am a blogger. RSS- Real Simple Syndication a method by which a website creates a feed or stream of content for others to access, republish, reformat and distribute. SPIM - Spam in an Instant Message; or, using the technology of instant messaging to disseminate content without the permission of the recipient. THIS EMAIL ****************************** This is an email summary of many long and poorly written rants online. It is intended to serve as a supplemental mailing for friends that are not into reading blogs or using feed aggregators (yet). This email is an informal summary of concepts, news and interesting ideas that emerge from work at www.greenmediatoolshed.org or from posts at www.networkcentricadvocacy.net ****************************** To subscribe or suggest I start spamming one of your friends with these, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or call me at 202-326-8728. All names are confidential (really just a list on my laptop). Your information will never be sold. ****************************** To unsubscribe, send an email with "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or call me at 202-326-8728. ****************************** Marty Kearns Executive Director Green Media Toolshed 1200 New York Ave. #300 Washington DC. 20005 202-326-8728 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- End of forwarded message ------- ^ ^ ^ ^ Steven L. 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