Next stop Denver! 
I’ve got about one and a half weeks before I start the roadtrip to Denver, and in that time I want to do some prep, if there’s interest, with other bloggers who will be there, or people who are covering the convention remotely, or are just interested in what’s happening there.
I have a great toolkit, code that can connect all the blogging and micro-blogging environments, Twitter, Identi.ca, FriendFeed and RSS of course, and probably most other kinds of connections you can think of.
I want to do photos, audio and video.
I’ll have two computers with me, a 17-inch MacBook Pro, fully loaded; and an Asus Eee PC.
I’ll be driving to and fro, with stops Salt Lake and Boulder. I’m going to try to stay on the grid the whole way, let’s see if it works. Last time I made this trip, in 2003, Sprint didn’t have much coverage except in the cities.
I’ll be staying in downtown Denver, very close to the Pepsi Center.
I’d love to meet as many people interested in technology and politics as possible. I was at the 2004 convention in Boston, when all this was very new, and that trip was mostly awe — amazement at being there, amazement at the spectacle and the incredible post-9/11 security. My guess is that the security will be tight this time as well, but we’ll still have fun!
Let me bring back your wishes from the political blogosphere to TechLand. I’m hoping to come back brimming with ideas and positive energy.
Did you wonder what #dontgo means? (I did.)
I’ve found the hash tags people were putting on their twits really annoying, never thought they would catch on, until a few days ago I started hearing about #dontgo — and until this morning I didn’t know what it was about.
Read this e.politics post, it explains.
Republicans have been using Twitter to organize.
An innovation that came from the tech community is being used by the political bloggers on Twitter.
Let’s pick a day and all inflate our tires together
I love how Barack Obama picked up the ball and threw it back in the Republican’s faces. Indeed, they do annoy with their ignorance, they’re not really that stupid, but they delight in provoking a reaction.
It’s not even smart politics as Maureen Dowd pointed out yesterday in her eloquent NYT column, where she nailed it about McCain and former President Bill Clinton, and former #1 black political leader Jesse Jackson. A generation of alpha males has been left behind in the Obama juggernaut, and they’re not happy.
Obama did something very good, if it’s true that properly inflating our tires would save up to 4 percent of the oil we use. That’s actually a lot of savings. If we spend $700 hundred billion a year on oil, 4 percent is $29 billion. We’re not so rich that we can look the other way at an opportunity to, as a nation, save that much money.
And listen to this carefully — we need something positive we can do together to help all of us. It’s been a long time since we had a national project. The Republicans laugh at Jimmy Carter’s sweater, but that just tells us one thing, they’ve been running things too damned long. (And Bill Clinton was no better, with his “depends what is is” bullshit.) It’s time to get smart.
We need to find more ideas that can make us $29 billion, again and again. We need to think like a corporation that wants to return to profitability because that’s what’s going to heat our homes and keep us moving. We’ve run out of frontiers to exploit, and now we have to face the reality that we must learn how to live with each other. The sneering and bullying must be over, and Obama did what we all have to do when faced with willful ignorance — tell it to fuck off, we don’t have the time for this nonsense, we’re busy solving problems, no time to argue with idiots.
So I suggest we pick a day, next week or the week after, and help each other check our tire pressure and fill those tires and start saving the money — now. It would be something nice the oil companies could help with too. Get on our side for a change.
Micah: “How do we make this something real so that others sense they’re part of something larger?”
Scripting News Annex 