Colin, thanks for another great class, and good luck with the Hartford Courant. I, for one, will continue to subscribe... 

That's all, folks!!!

Ithink it's pretty fascinating that a group has spent this kind of effort
tracking down the interrelational properties of websites. I'm thinking
we could use it to help spread useful memes and possibly to interrupt
the flow of damaging ones. For instance, if we have a new idea for
Bobby's ( I won't call him BJ anymore) social agenda, we get our
bloggers to start posting strategic comments on the social news line.
Someone makes a disparaging review of our candidate on the news line,
and we know exactly where to head to get "upstream" and "downstream" of
this information so that we can attempt to "vaccinate" the Internet of
these viral messages. But we can only do this with a highly engaged and
dedicated blogging team. It would definitely be worth having a
conversation with the iA group to see what kind of support or
consultation they can offer us.

Then I came home and was reading the Sunday Hartford Courant this morning, where I saw another article about planned closings of the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press.  Are these actions related to the tanking economy, the influence of the Internet, or both? For a lifelong newspaper reader like myself, I'm apprehensive of how our news will be affected when the number of outlets for different voices grow smaller and smaller. I personally am not confident that the blogosphere is going to be able to fill in the void, and I can't imagine that the suviving papers in these markets--the Denver Post, the Hartford Courant--are very comforted by the demise of their competition. I knew newspapers were in trouble, but I thought they still had at least five years to get their acts together, and I'm amazed at how much the Internet waves have already eroded at their bases.

Initial thoughts:

• Along the 50 state/435 district strategy lines, I think one method could be to staff each of our Jindal District HQ office with young, computer savvy volunteers to serve as local bloggers and vloggers. These volunteers are plugged into Jindal HQ through Twitter or similar technology and can be dispatched whenever a presidential candidate makes an appearance in their district, to cover news storyin their districtperceived by Jindal HQ to be of impact to the campaign, and, conversely, to write/film about issues to alert Jindal HQ of rising issues or news stories that otherwise could catch the campaign off guard. These volunteers would also spend a significant amount of time surfing blogs and emails looking for emerging memes that could be damaging to the Jindal image, and work to thwart off anything viral before it picks up speed on the internet. This includes oversight of wiki entries andGoogle management.
• As a sports-minded consultant,I think there is an excellent opportunity to benefit from BJ's youth and energy. I would propose acampaign theme along the lines of "America: Strong, Fit, and Lean" or something similar. Strong, meaning strong military and defense, strong infrastructure, strong economy. Fit, meaning physical fitness (i.e. combating child obesity), mental fitness (fixing the No Child Left Behind program and upgradingthe educational programs in our cities, combating Alzheimer's to court the elderly vote), and perhaps even spiritual fitness, promoting traditional family values and the role of God in marriage, inviting open discussions about religious diversity in America and working to disrupt the cycle of religious brainwashing that is the backbone of Al Qaeda. Lean, meaning cutting back on government waste, fraud, and abuse, and demanding the same from Wall Street and MainStreet alike.
• Some early media ops: Between now and 2010, we want BJ andhis family to engage in an exerciseprogram and healthy diet, if they aren't doing so already. We want to establish working relationship with other fitness-minded Republicans, especially Gov. Schwarzenegger of California, who could become a key ally and perhaps a cabinet appointment after BJ's election. The Winter Olympics come to Vancouver inwinter 2010--we want to contact the IOC as early as possible to see if we can get the torch to run through Louisiana and get the Jindal family to carry it. I'd also like to seek out anopportunity to challenge the Obama administration in a White House basketball pickup game after Obama has the presidential basketball court renovated, whichhe supposedly is planning to do.

Joe Durette, chief marketing strategist at DDCC, agreed. "Everyone
remembers Ronald Reagan as the Great Communicator, but many don't
realize he was also known as the Great Shuffleboarder. If you had your
disc on 10 and he had one to play, you might as well give him the score.
It was a huge advantage with the octogenarian vote. Walter Mondale, on
the other hand, was more of a pencil-pushing crypto-gram kind of guy,
and it made him hugely unpopular. Nobody likes those puzzles.
Personally, that's always the page of the newspaper that I place under
the kitty-litter box."

"Bill Clinton might've had chicken-legs, but he could run like a
gazelle. People like that. In contrast, Bob Dole had a limp libido and
intermittent incontinence. Let's face it, nobody wants to see their
commander-in-chief waddling to the men's room with his cheeks squeezed
together in the midst of a World Peace Summit."

"We kind of won by default with G.W. in 2000 and Aught-four," Miss Dain
continued. "I remember when Al Gore showed up at the James Brady 5K Road
Race in red Pro-Keds, white knee-highs, polyester green shorts, and a
V-neck T-shirt. You just can't dress like that and gush on about 'your
Internet' without expecting to be labeled a nerd. We took the
High-School Bully vote by over 95% that year. Then came John Kerry with
his pearly whites, his wavy hair, and his polo shirts. He just had Yacht
Club written all over him. It doesn't matter how many times you win
America's Cup--sports fans just don't want to see that crap opposite the
football box scores in the sports pages."

"Things didn't go as well as planned this year," Durette confessed. "We
thought we had everything under control after Obama bowled a 47 and
threw all of those gutter balls. Pennsylvania and Ohio were falling like
duckpins for us. Then came that footage of him draining an outside jump
shot on the basketball court and hitting nothing but net. I mean, who
doesn't want a guy on their team who can hit a clutch three? We tried to
counter by having Sarah plug a few wolves from the chopper, but people
just didn't seem to get it. We got some mileage with Todd the First Dude
on the snow-machines, but that went south after the press disclosed
reports about all the silk underwear Sarah bought him. There's just no
way to connect Polaris and Danskin for Men without conjuring up some
pretty disturbing mental images. The thought was if we could get Sarah
on an Iditarod sled wearing some lacy Victoria's Secret garments we
might've been able to turn the election around, but it just wasn't the
right season for that."

"Right now we don't know what to do about Bobby Jindal. He has a sort of
JFK frailty about him. Preliminary tests have him scoring well in
curling and synchronized swimming, but we're not sure if there's any
potential there just yet. If we can get him to pull off a couple of
aerial 360's on a mountain bike, we might have something there."

So now I'm thinking, why can't we do that here?

One of my greatest frustration with taking Colin's "Blogging On" class a
few years ago was the fact that the majority of student blogs came to an
abrupt end a day to a week after the semester had ended. I kept my blog
going, admittedly on life-support at times, and maybe a couple of other
students who had a use for their blog beyond the structure of the class,
but that was about it. I believe one reason for this is because it's
easier--and more engaging--to write with direction and purpose than it
is to write a daily or weekly diary. And when I say "write", I mean
"blog". Something that is intended to generate readership, because if no
one is reading then a sense of futility sets in. Believe me, I know, and
it's not necessarily due to poor writing, it's that sense of purpose
thing. And while I've enjoyed this class immensely, the truth is it's
over in a couple of weeks, we'll all go our separate ways again, and all
of the fascinating things we've learned and experienced in this class
will be stored away in some cubby holes in our minds. But it doesn't
have to be like that.

Here at Trinity College there is a wonderful and largely untapped
potential to use the Media Giraffe Project framework to create a campus
and community news and op/ed website presence from scratch. Being a
commuting graduate student, I'm not aware of all of the machinations
that currently exist within the general student body, but I'm thinking
more of something emanating from the Graduate Studies department. This
website (or blog) could grow into a vital voice on campus and in the
surrounding community, providing publishing/ video opportunities for
graduate and undergraduate students alike, as well as linking to
faculty, community leaders, and existing MSM as well. I know Trinity
Graduate Studies doesn't have a journalism program, but it certainly has
English, American Studies, Public Policy, etc., all of which could
become contributors. It could also help organize and drive student
activism, and could also use Twitter-type technology to engage its
readership on the campus and beyond.

My opinion is that our current class could serve as an excellent
launching pad for such a project, with a core group of interested
students forming an "editorial board" seeking ways to implement the
concepts presented by the Media Giraffe Project, including reaching out
to the Computer Sciences department for collaboration. The endeavor
could likely qualify as an independent research project for Spring '09,
in which we hypothesize and then document the implementation process and
its perceived impact at the end of the semester. I'm willing to bet we
could even talk Colin into being an advisor for the project, although I
don't want to put words into his mouth. I just think that a hands-on
project like this would be an excellent instructional experience that
can would not only benefit Trinity, it would give us invaluable
experience on the cutting-edge of media studies, something that I for
one would be eager to participate in.

Then I read the article about the New York Times invading Facebook, and developing a marketing strategy based upon the social networking site, and I couldn't help but think, "Leave it to the marketing slugs to figure out how to suck the blood out of a phenomenom like Facebook." But I shouldn't be surprised because Facebook seems to be getting more and more commercialized every day. I think that will eventually be a turnoff for some users. (Incidentally, you can find me on Facebook by doing a Friends search using name = Joe and school = Trinity.)

Now I am trying to swallow all of this information coming at me in the class blog over the past week. It seems like more than I can handle at this time. I've been going at it since I got home today (about four hours ago) and haven't made much of a dent in it yet. I need to take a break for a while but hopefully I can get through the rest of this tomorrow before class.

Things changed for me in the 2000 election campaign. Voting with my brain, I saw that George W. Bush didn't have a very impressive one. At this time I had migrated away from the business ventures and more toward activism and environmentalism, so I was more attracted to a Gore presidency than a Bush one. I also began to sense a change in the Republican party that seemed to emphasize sensationalism, deception, distortion, and propaganda, which I didn't like. When the election results came in and all of the shenanigans went down in Florida with Jeb Bush as Governor, I was convinced the election had been manipulated, and that the Republicans had become highly skilled in the intangible art of mind manipulation. This was evidenced again four years later when John Kerry ran against Bush and left with his head spinning by the calculated efforts of the Republican Propaganda Machine.

This year the charismatic Barack Obama was able to rise above the throes of the Machine, partly because of an inspired campaign and voter registration strategy and partly because, I believe, the American public was sick of being lied to and sold a bag of goods. Had John McCain won the RNC nomination in 2000, I probably would have voted for him, and had he campaigned with a positive strategy and selected an intelligent running mate based on accomplishment rather than fluff, I would have given him more serious consideration this time around. His greatest mistake, I believe, was trying to buy into the support of the Machine rather than distancing himself from it, and I think many people like myself had just had enough of it. The conservative radio jocks--Limbaugh, Hannity, Cunningham, Savage, etc.--will say anything and smear anyone, because to them the end justifies the means. Their syndication numbers reveal the power of their corporate support which, in turn, signifies the ex
tent to which corporate America has a stake in controlling the thoughts of the people who pull the levers and fill in the dots. Something needs to be done about the intentional spread of misinformation and untruths, but I'm not sure that a new Fairness Doctrine is the answer, or that we can legislate anything without impinging first amendment rights. Maybe class action libel or slander lawsuits are the answer, allowing the American public or specifically targeted individuals or groups to hit the liars at Corporate Radio where it hurts them the most: in their wallet.

I sooo have to get to the Town Hall to change my affiliation...

It's just amazing that this dingbat is currently outpolling Romney and Huckabee as the most likely RNC presidential candidate for 2012. Talk about a party that has lost its way!