I made a little bit of internet history on Monday, when--wearing my other hat as contributing editor of MediaBistro's Fishbowl D.C.--I became the first blogger to attend (and blog) a White House press briefing. Thanks to a New York Times article and an otherwise slow news day, my presence became quite a big story in Washington and I've been running around the last two days spending almost as much time being interviewed by reporters as I've spent interviewing reporters about covering the White House.

During those interviews, I've had an opportunity to reflect on the larger meaning of my presence. It's hard to say that this was a seminal moment or even a relatively important one. What's easy to say, though, is that it was a highly symbolic moment that marked another stage in the steady evolution of the importance (and acceptance) of blogging. more

The November elections may still be an all-too-recent memory (especially here in D.C. where planning for next week's lavish inaugural is daily front page news), but we're already thinking about and readying ourselves for the next cycle. Although the New Haven Register beat us to it, we wanted to welcome EchoDitto's newest client: Connecticut gubernatorial candidate John DeStefano, Jr., the mayor of New Haven. more

The scale of Sunday's earthquake and resulting tsunamis is really incredible. I drove back from my holidays in Vermont and listened to hours of reporting on NPR from correspondents throughout Southeast Asia. I just can't fathom a death toll that jumps by tens of thousands every time I check the news. There's also news that's just bizarre: The earthquake was so powerful it actually affected the planet's rotation and shortened the day, and it moved the entire island of Sumatra one hundred feet.

You'll notice on the right hand side of our website we've posted a button linking to the World Food Programme's donation page. The WFP, in case you're not familiar with it, is the world's largest humanitarian organization and they will have the largest role in providing assistance to the affected area. In short, they'll be providing all of the necessary food. And they badly need help.

The blog world is providing some good resources too. The Wikipedia has a great page on the disaster and a new blog is tracking information and news as well. more

[cross-posted] I'm slowly exploring the world of Podcasting—listening to radio and audio programs on my iPod—and this weekend, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell's keynote address at the October PopTech conference. Best known as the author of "The Tipping Point" and a writer for the New Yorker, he spoke about his upcoming book, "Blink," which examines human nature and decision-making. His thoughts gave me a lot of hope for a more progressive vision in this country—particularly that we should not be afraid to take aggressive stands and go out on a limb. His points were three:

• People's opinions are remarkably unstable.
  
• People pick up cues unconsciously. We can't explain how or why we do certain things and prefer certain other things.
  
• Asking people to think about and articulate their preferences changes them—but not really.

Gladwell basically argues that you can't actually trust people's opinions on things that they don't really understand. There's a visceral level of preference that people are unable to articulate, and thus, when pressed, they say they want something less sophisticated than their actual preference—because they know how to express something less sophisticated. Additionally, when confronted with new ideas outside the normal realm of people's worldview, they often just say they don't like something or that it's "ugly," because they lack words to describe it otherwise.

He uses three main examples—the Herman-Miller Aeron chair, which went on to become the best-selling chair in the history of office chairs, despite nearly unanimous market research that it was "ugly" and unpopular; New Coke, which Coke's marketing tests showed beat the opposition by 55 to 45; and a university study involving poster choice that found that when asked to explain a person's choice of posters, people took posters that made them unhappy. more

In addition to moving offices (I'm sure we'll blog tomorrow from our first day in the new space), I've spent much of the last week working on a paper on "The State of Internet," which aggregates a lot of reports about how the internet is changing people's lives and routines. While even I'm blown away by some of the information I'm finding, there's been a lot of news in the last week about just how large this whole "internets" thing is getting. Mind you, these aren't just rumors:

• For starters VeriSign—which maintains the master list of domain names and for a variety of reasons is one of the most reviled companies in the tech community—announced that it has registered another 5.1 million new domains in Q3 2004, bringing the total to nearly 66.3 million active domain names. I own a good dozen of them, and I know Nicco owns a few hundred too.

• The internet's size is also in view in a ZD Net article about "the magic that makes Google tick." The article details some of the impressive technology that allows Google to index 40 terabytes of data containing eight BILLION web pages and search that data over 1,000 times every second of every day.

• Turning to specifics now, Clickz has pulled together a fascinating "The Blogosphere by the Numbers":

  In terms of viewership, the Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates about 11 percent (approximately 50 million) of Internet users are regular blog readers. Active bloggers, meanwhile, update their blogs regularly, to the tune of more than 275,000 posts daily, or about 11,000 updates an hour.

• Two more pieces of evidence that this blogging thing is really taking off:

  (1) Microsoft got into blogging this week, launching MSN Spaces (albeit with a few problems)

  (2) BusinessWeek decided to examined the business possibilities of blogging. I'll leave it to Joshua to parse this piece if he desires.

Following up to Nicco's post last week, the L.A. Times announced today that it is ending the publication of its National Edition, citing the internet as a more effective way to reach markets beyond California:

The Los Angeles Times is killing its printed daily national edition at the end of the year, saying the Internet and other electronic distribution channels have made the paper copy irrelevant.

The Times, owned by Chicago-based Tribune Co., prints the national edition in Baltimore and distributes it in Washington and New York.

...

National editions of major daily newspapers -- particularly weekly editions, such as The Washington Post's -- can seem increasingly stale in an era when millions can get instant news via the Internet.

Indeed. It appears that Dave Winer's prediction that the New York Times will eventually be a blog is coming closer. Some papers are heading that way faster than others. more

Who knows whether the "blogger" will be the Person of the Year, but "blog" is now officially the Word of the Year.

Now if only we could agree on a definition. Joshua, Emily, Jim, and I had a spirited debate over what the definition of a "blog" was. We'll going to hash that out here over the coming days, but here's Merriam-Webster's definition:

Blog -- noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

There's a starting point. Here's another. more

I came across today an article written by Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Brittannica, about his reactions to the Wikipedia, or what he calls the "faith-based encyclopedia":

...The Wikipedia project is flourishing. As of November 2004, according to the project's own counts, nearly 30,000 contributors had written about 1.1 million articles in 109 different languages, though some of these language versions of Wikipedia remained quite small. The Manx Gaelic version, for example, had only 3 articles, the Guarani 10, and the Klingon (yes, from the Star Trek series) 48. The largest, the English language version, contained over 382,000 pages that were thought "probably" to be encyclopedic articles. (The "probably" tells as much about the limits of Wikipedia's oversight as any single word possibly could.)

All-in-all, it's not a very flattering piece, but you can't help but a get a sense that he just doesn't "get" it. The whole piece is written with a patronizing tone that sees the Wikipedia only as a distraction from "real" reference sources. He points out problems in a few entries and uses that and the Wikipedia's instructions to damn it as a "reliable" tool.

But that's not really the point of wikis. They're not meant to be perfect right out of the box. They're "open source," collaborative, and iterative knowledge, just like the heart of the internet. They represent millions of people coming together and pooling their talents towards a greater (non-commercial) goal. Wikis are an exercise in the shared humanity of the world, and that's something you're never going to get out of a "closed source" solution like Encyclopedia Brittannica.

What's more interesting, though? If you go to the Alexander Hamilton entry that McHenry specifically picked apart, you'll see that the errors he pointed out have already been fixed. I don't know whether he fixed them or someone else did after reading his article, but the wiki world is self-correcting and it's always possible to edit away.

No, the wikipedia isn't perfect, but every day it is getting better. Just look at how far it's come in three years, and imagine what it'll be like in ten years. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the massive Encyclopedia Brittannica's first editions in 1768 weren't the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge then either.

(If you're looking for more information on wikis, this is as good a time as any to unveil the EchoDitto Wiki page. If you have a favorite wiki, let us know and we'll add it below.) more

I've been talking with friends on the ground across the country -- including our own folks out in the states.

Here at Democratic HQ, DCCC Chairman Bob Matsui just came through, wishing us all luck. He sounded confidant and we're all really pumped. Go Democrats!

Check out Resultron for the most up-to-date results. more