Netroots Nation

Crossposted from Rock the Vote's Rock the Trail

I know we're working on getting Jon set up for a possible liveblog on Future Majority, but I thought I'd post my latest blog post at RTV about him from an interview I did at NN08.

Thirty year old Jon Powers never anticipated running for office, but after his military service in Iraq he knew that he needed to do something more. So, he started a non-profit that aimed to help keep kids from turning to extremist groups.

"War Kids Relief worked with Iraqi ministers to develop programs for the Iraqis to implement. It provided needed research on the state of Iraqi youth. It brought Iraqi youth to the attention of a Washington devoted solely to military tactics.

War Kids Relief worked to prevent a future generation of terrorists from growing in Iraq. It briefed Marine commanders on counterterrorism and the importance of engaging Iraqi youth." According to the site.

But Powers didn't stop there. He decided to run for Congress to continue his efforts to give back. One reason his site says he is running hit home with me. Evidently not all of New York is Manhattan or the Hamptons. Indeed there are many parts of New York that are just as rural as parts of Kansas and Oklahoma. Powers says that in his travels throughout Western New York he has met "folks who are worried that their sons and daughters are leaving the area because there are not enough job opportunities." Those are definitely tough issues that both parties work to navigate here in my home state.

Powers approaches issues in much the same way as people do around here. His enthusiasm as a young candidate brings something unique to the table. I caught up with him making care packages to send overseas to the soldiers as part of the Netroots for the Troops program.

Carnahan's are a pretty big name in Missouri politics as public servants who have gone above and beyond to lead and serve with distinction. The first (possibly only) campaign my cousin (who is 10 years older than me and have always looked up to) was a Carnahan campaign. I haven't stopped hearing about them since.

But as a next generation voter and politico in my family, I've discovered my favorite Carnahan in Robin for her relentless pursuit of fair and accurate voting laws.

Give the post I did yesterday about the Durbin/Schakowsky/SAVE Student Voter Bill extravaganza, I wanted to also highlight some of the dangers Missouri faced in had the new voter ID bill passed. These laws and other "policies" enacted by renegade county clerks can result in the disenfranchisement of hundreds if not thousands. The bill presented yesterday seeks to help with some of those stumbling blocks, but the states can do so much more. Look to Robin Carnahan as a guide. As her site says

"It is also my job to protect the voting rights of every eligible citizen. Not 95% of our citizens. Not just Missourians who have a drivers license or a passport. But every eligible Missouri citizen.

I caught up with Secretary Carnahan at Netroots Nation where she educated many of us about election laws and their impact on voting. She took a few minutes to speak with me about how these laws affect young people.

note: I have no idea why this video is still processing, its had 10 hours... re-uploaded and 5 minutes later works... conspiracy??

Famed blogger and nice guy extrordinar Jonathan Singer sat down with me Saturday evening at NN08 to discuss the reason there weren't that many young bloggers at Netroots Nation and indeed the number of young people who are/are not blogging. I'm hoping this posts the first time it was too long and was rejected..

Matt Browner Hamlin who appeared Saturday Afternoon on the Online/Offline Activism panel . Matt has a great history of online and offline activism through his roll on the Dodd campaign, FISA, and net neutrality.

Matt Ortega, who appeared on the Latino Panel Dos Centavos

Great conversation with Nate Thames (a Kansas native) who now works for ActBlue and helps create opportunities for candidates and their supporters to raise money online.

• MTV is finally running its first paid political ad - and it's an attack on Senator Obama run by a third party organization. Classy. In a conversation I had with an MTV rep, they said that third party ads would be reviewed and accepted on a case by case basis. If newfangled swiftboaters can get their ads placed, I assume MoveOn or other progressives will have no trouble getting their own ads on TV, right?
• EJ Dione at The Washington Post pens the Best. Op-Ed. Ever. on the youth vote by a professional political pundit.
• McCain is getting ready to roll out new social networking features on his website to attract young voters. Because McCainspace was such a smashing success last year, right? I think Bondelli has the right take on building new social networks, but I've got no problem with McCain competing with the College Republicans to see whose social network can suck worse. Divide that tiny potential audience up and doom them both to failure.
• Jason at the Sentinel posted slides from his two excellent Netroots Nations panels on how to monetize, popularize, and all around make your blog more kickass.
• MSNBC has an interesting story about the role that nonprofits play in our elections. If you want to know about the differences between 501c 3, c4, and 527 organizations, it's not a bad place to start, even if there are some questionable assumptions about issue advocacy and ideology in the piece.
• Youth to Power made Micah Sifry and Andrew Raseij's "political beach-reading list."
• Facebook has plans to take over the rest of the interwebs . . .
• Over at his other blog, Kevin reports that Kanye West and MTV are teaming up to welcome home veterans and shed more light on the situation of our soldiers as they return home.

Here are a couple of my thoughts about the Netroots Nation conference as a whole.

Gratuitous Use of Paper

Tony Cani was the first of our group to really point out the ridiculous amount of paper being used at a progressive blogger conference. Starting with the attendee bags to the handouts for every little product, issue, and event, unwanted paper was everywhere. Over at Grist there is a good commentary about the paper use as well as pictures of all the paper in the registration bags. Tony had some really great lines about the paper use: "It's amazing how every progressive organization's desire to limit paper use ends with the opportunity to hand something out for their organization" and "If only this were a conference where you knew people would be able to access the conference materials online" *note sarcasm. Next year Netroots Nation plans to be more environmentally friendly and carbon-neutral, so we will see what changes will be made.

The Youth Are Here

Another observation made by a lot of the serial attendees is that the demographic now includes many more young people. Wiretap has a story about this, which quotes me on the issue, that you should check out. I think that the transition from YearlyKos to Netroots Nation might have helped open the conference up to more young bloggers. When YearlyKos was first conceived, it was designed to be a really large meet-up for the contributors to DailyKos, a Demographic that is much older than people imagine. As we move towards a general netroots conference from a site community specific one, I think that the number of young attendees will increase. Here is my quote from Wiretap that covers it a bit more:

"Blogging is not as exciting a tool for Millennials as it is for older generations. Social networking and other very quick tools for sharing themselves trump the blog as a form of expression. The older generation has never been able to express themselves to an audience before, yet are not entirely comfortable with this next step that Millennials have taken. For older generations, blogging is the new pamphleteering. I also think that the older generation writes more for the sake of writing where Millennials are writing for their friends."

Twitter is Useful

Twitter was used quite effectively at the conference. The use of the #NN08 hash tags allowed people to see what fellow attendees were saying, where they were at, what surprise guests have arrived, and to meet up with other people.

I had another interesting observation about Twitter in one of the panels I was sitting in on Saturday. I sent out a tweet with the link to my recent coverage of the conference on Future Majority, and I see the person sitting in front of me get the tweet, open the link, and read it without even realizing the guy that wrote it was sitting right behind him.

I think as Twitter becomes more ubiquitous and people have more experience using it at events we will learn more about how twitter can be a very useful and effective tool for communicating at conferences.

Conclusion

I had a great time at Netroots Nation meeting a lot of people that I had only worked with online previously, as well as people I met completely for the first time. I'm looking forward to doing it again in Pittsburgh next summer.

Those were just my thoughts about the conference, what did you think? Leave a comment and share!

So, I'm finally settled back in. Here's the rest of those Quick Hits I didn't get to while at the Austin airport, as well as a few more that have accumulated since.

• The Austin Statesman picked up our little youth caucus, but seemed to miss the point. The caucus was an informal meeting, not a strategy session to construct a master youth plan. And the focus of the discussion - to what extent our youth movement needed to be about GOTV and infrastructure for organizing our peers, or building an ideological consensus - was barely touched on in his piece.
• In this piece by The Washington Post, 29 year old Republican tech strategist David All confirms the complete disconnect between the GOP and Millennials. My favorite line:
  

  David All points to a page on McCain's Web site as more old-fogy branding:

• PEW reports that young voters in this election are at least - if not more - knowledgeable about the candidates' position on Iraq.
• Anderson Cooper's ac360 blog profiles HeadCount and their latest work at the Camp Bisco festival.
• The Virginia Pilot reports that young Viginians (under 25) are registering at twice the rate of their elders. Registration has increased 10% in the last year.
• Rumors abound that Barack Obama is going to show up as a surprise guest at this year's Lollapalooza, which takes place in his hometown of Chicago.
• Young People For just announced the new class of their Front Line Leaders Academy.
• Nine Latino organizations are teaming up to spend $5 million on a nonpartisan voter registration effort targeting 2 million Latinos.
• Finally, Rock the Vote is teaming up with Comcast in its effort to register 2 million new voters this election cycle. I'm not a fan of this partnership. Last year, Comcast was caught blocking internet traffic from peer to peer networks. They are on the wrong side of the Net Neutrality debate.

I'm at the airport now headed home from Netroots Nation and feeling beat up and burnt out from four days of panels, networking, and - as is always the case at this conference - partying. I totally concur with Kevin that for a conference of by and for bloggers, it's amazingly hard to get any blogging done at the conference. There are just too many people to talk to and panels to attend and you end up spending the vast majority of your time offline.

The Young Voter PAC Celebrity Bar Night event - co-sponsored by Future Majority - was a huge success last night. I think the draw of Darcy Burner, Markos, and others behind the bar brought a lot of folks in, and we also benefited from the fact that our party was the last official party of the conference and it seemed to have good word of mouth most of the day on Saturday. In fact, so many people showed up that we ran out of contribution forms for the FEC compliance and we had to frantically run off copies. It created a bit of a bottleneck (and some grumblings about the line being too long and too slow), but as far as problems go, those are good ones to have. Don't know how much the event raised for the Young Voter PAC yet, but the event went as well as it possibly could have and I think it brought in a good amount. Sarah and Jane both have pictures from the event and video of the celebrity bar tenders. Those will likely go up in the next few days once we all get back to our respective homes and properly recover from the weekend.

One of the other casualties of the conference (aside from blogging) is my feedreader, which will take some time to get through. In the meantime, here's a few things I've been able to pull out so far:

• Tech Republican reports that young Republicans are starting to encourage their party to reach out to young voters. Check out the talking points - very similar to what we've been saying to Democrats for the last four years - real peer to peer outreach about the issues:

  The trick is not coding a killer Facebook app or producing a phenomenal YouTube video. Those things are necessary, but not sufficient to create a real youth movement. The real challenge is instead (1) to identify the issues most important to youth voters; (2) to craft a Republican message to respond to those issues and concerns; (3) to deliver that message in such a way it feels authentic and real--the trick to being successful online as David Almacy explained yesterday; and (4) to pass the finished product along to youth voters through the right online portals (social networks, blogs, etc.).

• PEW Research suggests that cell phone-only users may not be skewing the presidential polls (by leaving younger, and likely more progressive, voters out of the sample pool). However, the study they quote found that including a cellphone sample in their poll increased Obama's lead over McCain by three percentage points. They don't quote a margin of error, so I really don't know what to make of this . . .

Oops, getting called to board now. I'll have to post the rest later.

Streaming LIVE!!

Update: When I was listening to Maria from Voto Latino answer part of Sarah's (someone not me from the audience) question w/r/t their outreach to the Latino community through myspace - she comments about how Latinos don't use facebook as much as they use MS and the impact of music and local dj's etc. on the community...

I wanted to say at one point that the common mistake from orgs that want to develop their own SN sites to be hosted on their websites is that 1. thats a waste of time, but 2. those that chose to just go with what they've got (meaning using existing online options) they ignore MS as a resource.

I can't remember if it was Kevin or Tony Cani who said while we were talking about this that MS is just ugly - if you agree you need to get over that. It isn't just Latinos that are using myspace its a number of minority voters, non college graduates, and high school seniors. Taking MySpace out of your SN outreach ignores a huge population of people. Which, clearly, you don't want to do.

I'm attending a panel right now about using social media to build an audience for your blog. It features Matt Browner Hamlin, the Online Director for the Mark Begich Senate Campaign (fomerly of the Dodd campaign and Students for a Free Tibet), Jason Rosenbaum of the Sentinel, Josh Nelson and Cheryl Contee.

Jason and Josh just are discussing best practices for getting content noticed on social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Buzzflash and Stumbleupon and they made an important point. It's very hard to get noticed by A-list bloggers or to break through the clutter on Daily Kos to get on the Recommended list or promoted to the front page. If you don't have solid connections to those bloggers already, trying to get them to link to you is not a great strategy to get noticed and build traffic (even if the audience of those blogs might seem like the most low-hanging fruit). While it may seem daunting to try to break into these social news communities, it can be a more efficient and successful strategy than trying to break through in the A-List blogs.

Other useful tips for using these site:

• Live or die by the headline. Most people try to convey their point and get people to click through to their article. That's a mistake. If you don't get on the front page, you are not going to get a lot of hits. So your goal in writing a headline should be to convince the reader to give you a vote.
• Be good community members. Don't just spam the site, but contribute other interesting articles not written by you.
• Engage the commenters. Just like on Daily Kos, you have to engage the community to build traffic and votes. And on sites like Digg, the number of comments can impact the algorithm and play a role in getting you on the front page.
• Have a small pool of allies - readers or cobloggers - to help jump-start your article with a few votes. It takes no time and on smaller sites like Buzzflash it can quickly help you get to the front page.

Videos from our exciting Youth Caucus Extravaganza! Might have to give it a sec its still loading..

Never thought I'd get these uploaded... rest below the jump