Wednesday, February 04, 2004

I started my third corporation last week. The new company is called Scripting News, Inc. It owns this site and a few others, and some software I'm working on. It's a Massachusetts corporation. So I guess I'm going to be here for a while.  

There's a Dean ad on www.weblogs.com. Surprising. 

j Baumgart: "I'm j Baumgart and I approved this message." 

Halley nails it on the missing element in the Dean campaign. They failed to arm the electorate with the best information. For a fraction of the cost of a state campaign, they could have deployed an information system for voters that would have made history. We'd be raving about how the Internet has made it possible to be a responsible voter for the first time. $40 million isn't a big drop in an ocean of television ads, but in the space of public information systems it's a virtually infinite amount of money. Next time we, as citizens, decide to endow a candidate with millions of our dollars, let's find out first what they plan to do with it. If they say "run ads" or hire expensive consultants, let's pass. A new term to go with this idea: Voter Support Systems.  

Political Wire: More Evidence of a Divided Nation. 

AP: Mass high court rules for gay marriage. Unfortunately this is going to be an issue in the 2004 presidential election. Kerry, the likely Democrat nominee, is from Massachusetts. Bush had strong language about this in his State of the Union speech. Even if you don't believe in gay couples' right to marry, certainly there are more pressing issues that should be discussed in this election cycle.  

What is Infoworld.Feedster.Com? 

CNN has a great table showing the returns from yesterday's primaries. Kerry won five, Clark and Edwards each won one. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Where Kerry won, he won with large margins. Clark's margin in Oklahoma was tiny, and while Edwards won by 15 points to Kerry in South Carolina, the rest of the field was left in the dust.  

NY Times: "Edwards and Dean still have small windows of opportunity" 

Ed Cone: "Is John Edwards the first North Carolinian to win a presidential primary?" 

My new RSS validator now recognizes Atom feeds and gives you a nice badge saying your feed validates. Some people felt that calling it an RSS feed was confusing. I'm pretty sure users will end up thinking of Atom as a flavor of RSS. The validator still recognizes RSS feeds, of course.