Netroots Nation

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

It's 3:30 here in Austin and I have already packed in a bunch of activities.

First, I attended the DNC & Obama for America: The Tools - Online Tools for Social Networking with Chris Hughes and Judith Freeman of the Obama campaign.

This panel was essentially about Obama for America's social networking strategy. Chris did most of the talking and did a very impressive job. This guy knows his stuff. The majority of the time was spent on the my.barackobama.com social network. Chris talked about how the purpose of myBO is to enable everyday people to bring about change as easily as possible.

He talked about how the campaign focused more on function than form. MyBO may not be the flashiest and best technology around, but it is designed to be as useful as possible. However, Chris says that they are working on improving the user interface of the site.

The core of myBO is about communities and the campaign's ability to pay attention to the community of supporters and to get them to use the tools in their own communities.

They spent some time talking about the new platform house party program, and how it is loosely structured to enable people to make their own events as relevant as possible to their communities. A couple of interesting things about the platform program: they created a really great host guide that makes organizing an event much less intimidating and they have staff follow up with party hosts throughout the process.

They talked about how myBO fits in to the Obama field program. People that were interested in helping did not have to wait for official campaign staff to come to their area in order to help the campaign. They made sure that there were a lot of things for people to do on the site no matter what their interests and preferences are.

There are three main ways that they organize on Facebook.

1. Campaign page: 1,150,000 supporters. They use it as a communications medium and do a lot with video. They use the page's update functionality to message their members.
2. Using local groups religiously. Everyone in field organization was told that they needed to create a Facebook group locally. If a lot of people join a group in a local network it makes it more likely to show up in people's feeds. This allows the size of the group to increase and then you have a direct line of communication to those people. There are significant ripple effects if you do it locally. One person in campaign headquarters can't create all the groups, it is something that must be done locally.
3. Creating a Facebook application. An effective way for people who are supporters to keep up what they are doing and share that information with their friends.

MySpace. Chris calls it a phenomenally important communications tool. The pages are much more customizable and they can encourage people to embed their own logos or widgets. They have incredible flexibility. Emphasize lowering the bar to make it easy as possible with many options to get them to put stuff on their page, which results in lots of distribution very quickly. At the end of the day they want people to get engaged in other campaign activities. They are trying to incorporate all of this energy and interest into the campaign programatically while at the same time getting as much distribution as possible.

The calling tool on myBo is something that is very effective and it enables people to make phone calls from the campaign that could or would not go to a campaign headquarters to do it. It is especially effective for the elderly and people living in rural areas.

During the question period Chris was asked about peer-to-peer from someone from PIRG's New Voters Project. Chris says that the campaign has reached the same conclusions that the research has: peer-to-peer contact is extremely effective in reaching young voters.

Rob Dolin sent me a tweet during the panel asking why the campaign chose to create their own social network instead of just using existing ones. This is the answer: most of the users of the myBO functionality tend to be older than those people that already are active in current social networks. It enables everyone that is interested to participate with a full campaign functionality that is not available within current social networks. It also removed the difficulty of data integration.

Dean's Registration Kick-Off Rally

Next was the rally with Governor Dean kicking of the DNC's new voter registration program. Over 100 people were outside in the heat and were definitely excited. Dean actually talked a bit about young voters and their importance, and a young College Democrat spoke earlier as well.

Youth Caucus

We just finished up the youth caucus. We had good attendance and a very engaged discussion that did not want to end when our time was up. A lot of topics were discussed, including coordinated leadership pipelines, what is the youth movement, what are the important themes for young people, and a lot of discussion on young people that never went to college and how to reach them.

Jim Slattery, US Senate candidate from Kansas, dropped by and talked about youth issues. It's great to see candidates really putting the effort in to make young voters an important aspect of their campaigns.

Now I am sitting in the hotel lobby writing this post. I think I will be going to the OpenLeft Caucus at 4:30 and then the Readers and Writers mixer, followed by the Howard Dean keynote.

Funny thing just happened. A couple of guys were walking by in the hotel that weren't associated with Netroots Nation, and one says to the other: "there are a lot of people in this hotel using laptops, huh." I bet this lobby looks really strange to people that don't realize that there is a blogger conference going on.

I'll have more later.

I'm in the Jet Blue terminal at JFK waiting for my flight down to Austin for Netroots Nation. I hate flying, but I'm somewhat looking forward to the flight down - 4 hours with no internet will give me a lot of time to work on a few blog posts that have been rattling round in my head for the past week.

Living Liberally will post their usual Tues-Thurs blog later today, but the rest of the week will likely consist mostly of live blogs from Netroots Nation. If you're going to be down there, here's where you will find me. I'll be the guy with the fish logo on his credential.

Two more things before I head offline. First, thanks to everyone who has contributed to our little fundraiser for the Young Voter PAC. We're not at 50 donors yet, but we're inching our way up there. Please give a little bit if you can. Second, here's some reading to tide you over until I land and the live-blogging begins:

• Tremayne at Open Left reports on the massive increase in voter registration on the Democratic side. A lot of that is from Millennials.
• Anya Kamenetz has a new column about the new interest rate on student loans and strategies for getting rid of your student debt.
• She's also got a blog post up about how the economic downturn is affecting youth employment.
• If you care, Jib Jab has a new video up lampooning McCain and Obama and riffing off Bob Dylan. Personally, I never thought they were all that funny . . .
• Earlier this week, Bergerc84 posted a thoughtful piece about McCain's (lack of) youth outreach. Well the gossip rags are now reporting that the McCain Blogette had lunch with Heidi Montag from The Hills. I guess that's McCain's idea of ramping up the youth outreach???
• Finally, the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights wants to know what Civil Rights 2.0 looks like and what Civil Rights means to Millennials. They're holding a YouTube competition to find out. They have a video, but the Jet Blue wifi doesn't seem to want to load YouTube so I'll have to embed it later.

Netroots Nation, the blogger-spawned progressive conference formerly known as Yearly Kos, will be in Austin this week from Thursday through Sunday and Future Majority will be there in force.

If you're a young person, young at heart, or curious about the youth vote, here's where you'll find us:

Thursday
---------------------------------------------------
Youth Caucus: 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM; Caucus, Room 18B

My flight gets in at 12:30 and I hope to make it to the latter half of the caucus, but look for Bondelli, Sarah, Jane or other FM contributors mixing with the crowd.

Friday
---------------------------------------------------
Youth to Power Book Signing: 11:30 AM - 12PM; Exhibit Hall Ballroom D, IG Publishing booth #315.

I'll be signing books alongside fellow IG author and blogger Jeffrey Feldman. We also have a Facebook event for this - go RSVP and invite others.

What's Next for the Next Generation? 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM, Workshop, Room 18D.

Jane Fleming Kleeb of the Young Voter PAC joins Gina Glantz and others to discuss how to move a youth policy agenda after the elections.

Saturday
---------------------------------------------------
Online Engagement to Offline Activism: 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM; Panel, Ballroom F

Myself, Jane Fleming Kleeb of the Young Voter PAC, Tony Cani of the Young Democrats, Sam Dorman of The League, Hans Riemer of the Obama Campaign, Maria Teresa Peterson of Voto Latino and Andrew Villaneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute will lead a concrete discussion on tactics to engage young voters online and move that support offline into the field. Bring your own ideas and be prepared to share.

For those of you who are curious, you can view video of the youth vote panel from last year here.

Celebrity Bartender After Party: Cedar Door’s Biergarten, 2nd and Brazos. 10pm - Midnight.

Once the day is done, we're teaming up with Living Liberally and the Young Voter PAC for a big throw-down celebrity bartender event. From 10pm to Midnight, Markos of Daily Kos, Matt Stoller of Open Left, candidates Scott Kleeb and Darcy Burner and more will serve you drinks. All food and drinks will be free for the first hour. You can buy tix, which go to support the Young Voter PAC, here.

This will be a great way to start your final night in Austin, and if previous years are any indicator, we'll all take the party elsewhere until the wee hours of the morning.

More details below. Hope to see you in Austin.

I just found out that one of the two panels that Jane Fleming Kleeb and I proposed to Netroots Nation was approved. I'll be moderating the panel, which will be called "Youth and Technology: Moving Online Engagement to Offline Activism," or what Josh Levy at Tech President likes to call "onffline" activism.

We had another panel about connecting the different threads of youth activism that was declined. More details to come in the next week or so.

In the meantime, here's some morning reading:

• Apropos of our panel topic, New America Media reports that young voters are putting in serious hours on the ground - not just online - in this campaign. The piece ends on something of a low-note.
• The AP discovers Cafe Press and decides to gauge the candidates support based on swag sales.
• And Fox New remembers the good old days (aka the 1980s) when young people voted Republican. Interesting sidebar to this story, a few weeks back, I sat next to the reporter's mother on an flight to Denver and we started talking about the youth vote. A week later, her daughter was using my talking points in one of her stories. Still no call or citations though . . .