Influence

I've met Hugh Hewitt professionally only once. We were on a panel together what seems to be like eons ago talking about online communities. He strikes me as a pomo-conservative : the kind that may if not laugh out loud, at least chuckle about South Park while sipping on a Beaujolais from his wine cellar.

Which is why when I read this, I did indeed LOL :

Saturday, February 02, 2008
"Paid For By Obama For America"
Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 2:49 PM
I heard a powerful Obama ad on K-Earth 101 while driving this morning. That's the '60s/'70s rock station. The pitch combined some fine Obama audio on change and the future with clips from the scores of newspaper endorsements the Illinois senator has racked up.

When you pull in $32 million in January, you can play in a variety of micro-markets.

If the GOP sends a 72-year into this race whose prime was from a different time at least two generations back to campaign solely on the need to win the current war, even his hero status won't help him against the tsunami that is building. Dole '96 will seem like an energized, cutting edge effort by comparison.

Perhaps there is some recognition of this in U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski's endorsement of Romney this morning. She can't be looking forward to a Senate GOP caucus reduced to a rump by an Obama-led blowout fueled by tens of millions that McCain cannot hope to match.

Yesterday I attended Fair Media Council's "Connections Day". I was one of the participants in the Blogging: The Power of Citizen Journalism panel.

I had a blast because I finally met Bob Cox, founder of the Media Bloggers Association and Steve Safran of Lost Remote. Bob is the patron saint of bloggers and Steve? Well, as you can see by his energy in this post, he's Bob's so-good-yet-evil twin.

As Steve points out, the debate was rather agitated and it went from, how can blogs be used by disseminate your message to the "we still own the media and you bloggers suck" debate. The three of us agreed we are in a transitional period at the moment, because the rules of engagement through reading and writing are changing.

Here's what I get from the discussions we had during the panel and afterwards: