Candidate Weblog Tools

#

Dave Winer wrote some advice for candidates about weblogs (nice title there, by the way, Dave). Most of it is pretty good advice. I got into a discussion over at Ed Cone's blog about the ethics of including independent bloggers (who pays? will the bloggers act like journalists?).

But his sixth piece of advice, Choice in tools, is totally bogus.

Dave knocks the Dean campaign for getting into the software business (and rumor-mongers about the Edwards campaign for the same; in fact, Edward's new blog is based on Slash). This is total nonsense.

There are two custom software projects the Dean campaign has developed (to my knowledge).

  1. The Get Local event scheduling tool. This piece of software could be better (RSS feeds by zip code would be nice), but there is nothing else like it out there. It was developed by a MoveOn staffer.
  2. DeanLink, a friendster clone. This thing is pretty fun to play with. It's supposed to be about introducing local Dean supporters to each other so they can plan events. It integrates with the Get Local tool. We'll see if it actually takes off.

The Dean campaign weblog is based on Movable Type.

The software that Dave specifically knocks the Dean campaign for developing is a weblog package called DeanSpace. But DeanSpace is just a module on top of Drupal, an open source content management system. It's essentially an aggregator plus a weblog, which can post items from the aggregator. Hmm, sounds like a certain commerical product I'm aware of. More specifically, it provides some nice features for running a campaign weblog/site: an events calendar, personal endorsements, and forums. All of this is tied together with RSS.

I customized Movable Type to do some of this for the Minnesota for Dean site -- but it was a lot of work! That's why it's nice for local groups who want to set up weblog-style campaign sites to have this software available. None of the weblog products on the market fit all of their requirements.

Furthermore, DeanSpace is developed mostly by volunteers and is open source. The founder of the project, Zack Rosen was recently hired by the campaign (see interview with him by Lisa Rein).

Dana Blankenhorn has more on the argument for custom software development, and a follow-up for Dave about what tools the campaign is using (I would note that most of the tools that Dana lists were not developed by the Dean campaign, which seems to be Winer's gripe).