Here’s a Globe and Mail article, in today’s edition, on DNC convention blogging. Here’s a clip:

While many still view these digital diaries as repositories for lukewarm teen angst, blogs have, in the past two years, become the preferred information sluice for political pundits large and small. About 35 bloggers received official accreditation for the Democratic National Convention that concluded Thursday in Boston.

One of those lucky three dozen included Peter Rukavina, who lives in Charlottetown and had the honour of being the lone accredited Canadian blogger at the Democratic gathering. Having to self-finance the trip meant that Mr. Rukavina, a computer programmer, could afford to stay only for two of the four nights of the convention.

Still, Mr. Rukavina did his best to harness the power of bloggery. His site, reinvented.net, offered a very personal and personable perspective on the political process. “I’m not sure I’ve been able to get any real sense of what this convention is for,” he wrote in a posting on Tuesday, the second day of the proceedings. “This is not a national town-hall meeting; it’s more akin to a televised debutante ball.

“I’m afraid that politics here in America is so abstracted from reality that it is, in fact, impossible to understand on a level other than the superficial.”

Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor believes that Mr. Rukavina and others like him provide a perfect example of what bloggers can and should bring to the journalism conversation.

Here’s an accounting for what it cost me to cover the DNC. All costs are in Canadian dollars, taxes included.

• Travel
• Confederation Bridge Toll (twice!): $78
• Gasoline: $30
• Air Canada, Moncton to Boston: $531
• Subway and taxi in Boston: $20
• Lodging
• Country Inn and Suites, Moncton: $100
• Sheraton Braintree, Boston: $580
• Internet Access
• Sheraton Braintree: $18
• Logan Airport: $10
• Other
• Meals: $50

Total cost comes out to $1417, or roughly $29/hour for my time on the ground in Boston.

Balanced against this is the income from the trip:

• Generous grant from a donor: $500
• Fee for reprint of blog in National Post: $100

Total real cash income was $600, which makes the real cost of the trip $817.

If I were concerned with things like this, which I am not, you could also count the exposure in the media as a sort of income. For example, the 250 agate lines of weblog reprint in the National Post is worth $3820 if seen as an advertisement.

Several reporters asked me why I would do something like this. CBC Radio reporter Pat Martel asked me, Gordon Sinclair style, “was it worth the money you spent?”

Having had some time to think about this, my best answer to the “why” is “because I’m an inveterate collector of experiences.” In lieu of formal education, I’ve choosen instead to learn about the world by playing around in various parts of it. I didn’t go to Boston, really, out of civic duty, out of interest in the political process, or even because of a passion for weblogging. I went because I knew it would be interesting, because I would learn something, because it would be an experience unlike any other.

And it was.

Thanks to those that helped, financially and logistically, to those that provided commentary to my posts, and pointed me in the right direction. And thanks to Catherine and Oliver for putting up with my eccentricities.

The Deutsche Welle article is now online. In German. With photos.

I just received an early copy of the text of the article that resulted from my interview on Tuesday with DW. It’s in German, and I ran it through the Google translator to get a sense of what it said.

My favourite part is how the description of the location of the blogger area in the Fleet Center translated:

There is even a special range for the Blogger, directly under the roof Fleet Center, in swindles of exciting height.

I believe that hits the nail, inadvertently, on the head.

Then there’s my description of the need for WiFi and power as a sort of addiction:

Then the Blogger sits there, and if one sees to them into the eyes, then they look like addicted ones, which do not get straight their drug?

This isn’t intended to be a comment on the article itself, simply on the manner by which Google machine translates it. I’ll have to learn German to get a real sense.

I’ll post a link to the article when it goes online.

Reinvented is sponsoring the Senior Women’s Canadian Fastpitch Championship again this year (we were a sponsor in 2002 as well). It’s taking place here in Charlottetown from August 8th to 15th, 2004.

We’ve got eight free tournament passes up for grabs; a tournament pass entitles you to entry all games at both fields. If there are any ball fans in the readership, and you’d like one, just email me and I’ll pass them out first-come, first-served.

Judge O’Toole released his opinion in the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, et al. v. MBTA hearing I attended yesterday. Edward has a full report.

I took the picture below at 1:05 p.m. That’s my flight up there on the board. Elementary physics suggests it is impossible to board a flight and take off in 5 minutes, especially with the crowd in the waiting room, which included several babies and small children.

Nobody expects airlines to be perfect. But the least they can do is be honest: providing false information like “your flight is on time” when it is obvious that it will not be is just plain bad basic customer service.

I started off this whole crazy DNC thing with a photo of my kit. Here are some notes on the tech behind the blog, and how it performed.

As detailed here, my mostly-trusty 12 inch iBook suffered a hard disk failure just over 7 hours before I was due to fly to Boston. Fortunately, brother Johnny’s 15 inch iBook was waiting and ready back in Charlottetown, and that’s what I took with me. It worked like a charm: I’ve used a lotta laptops, and this might be the best one yet. The screen is really big and bright, the battery gets 4-5 hours of life per charge, the keyboard has a nice feel, and the WiFi works great (I was often able to pick up distant WiFi networks that my PC-based blogmates couldn’t even see). There was some problem in the Fleet Centre with the special blogger WiFi and the Mac that meant that the Mac couldn’t get an IP address from the wireless access point via DHCP; this was quickly solved by entering a manual IP address (in the proper range) and hoping that you didn’t conflict with someone else.

WiFi, by the way, really is everywhere. As I type this, I’m sitting in Terminal C at Logan Airport, paying $7.95 for 24 hours of access. The hotel restaurant and lobby at the Sheraton Braintree has WiFi too, with 30 minutes for free and $10.95/day after that (with the same fee covering in-room wireline access). The Westin Copley Place, where credentials needed to be picked up every day, had several WiFi networks in evidence, some of them for-pay or protected, others free. Even walking along the shore from the Moakley Courthouse to the Fleet Center yesterday I was able to stop at a park bench and see 5 WiFi access points.

Because I knew that I would be far from the stage, and remembering my experiences trying to shoot photos from far back in the crowd back in January during the New Hampshire Primary, on the way through Moncton on Sunday I picked up a new Canon S1 IS. This turned out to be a dreamy wonder of a camera: the 10x optical zoom came in handy many times (especially with the “image stabilization” features that helps decrease the effects of shaking hands when zoomed in all the way). The ability to shoot video came in handy a couple of times as well, when a still photo wouldn’t tell the whole story. I bought a set of NiMH batteries at the same time (the camera only comes with alkaline non-rechargeables), and didn’t ever bump up against the need to charge them in three days of shooting. I’m really looking forward to taking more pictures with this camera. You can see all the photos I’m taken so far right here.

My Nokia 3285 cell phone performed well, with a signal almost everywhere other than the subway. Even inside the Fleet Center, where presumably everyone and their brother was on the phone at the same time. The only drawbacks of the phone were its size (it’s really too big to fit comfortably in pants pocket) and that because it doesn’t sync with my Mac’s address book (and because my own iBook died), I didn’t have access to the names and numbers I needed. My next phone will be smaller. And it will have to sync.

The one thing I felt lacking was some way of recording audio. The camera records audio when it’s recording video, but it’s hard to pass the camera back and forth like a microphone, and the video files can get huge. The iBook can record audio, but it’s not portable enough to record on-the-fly interviews or background. The two radio reporters I was interviewed by both at Sony mini-disc recorders, items I’ve also seen used by our local CBC reporters. I’ve always held off on investing in one of these because they record in a proprietary format and can dump the digital audio directly into a Mac; I may have to bit the bullet and get one if I want to do more audio work.

From insightful brother Mike:

You are now officially part of the problem.

Today’s episode of The Bloggers As The Story, Reinvented edition, goes like this…

First, a clip in the Baltimore Sun:

Food for thought

Peter Rukavina, a Web consultant from Canada who’s behind www.reinvented.net, wrote this from Boston:

“There are non-Mcdonalds food options in the entrance of the Media Center. They appear to have cases upon cases of Red Bull. What is Red Bull, anyway? There are also salads, breakfast cereals, and what looks like fruit salad.”

Later yesterday afternoon, Rukavina expressed a broader concern:

“This is not a national town hall meeting; it’s more akin to a televised debutante ball. I’m afraid that politics here in America is so abstracted from reality that it is, in fact, impossible to understand on a level other than the superficial.”

And that, Dube suggests, may be what the bloggers can do best, scratch the surface, but deeply.

Closer to home is Page A17 of today’s National Post where, frighteningly enough, they reprinted (with permission), my Matt Rainnie is the Devil post from yesterday morning. Here’s a screen shot:

What with all my “whacky” coverage of the convention, I think I’m well on my way to becoming the Bill Bramah of the blogosphere. At the very least, I’m a media whore.