C-SPAN Goes High Tech for Convention Coverage

Politics is not the focus on this blog but it is the season which comes around every four years when politics invades everything we do and so it is with my blogging. And with the Democratic National Convention being held in Denver next week it is hard to not want to be a part of the excitement. Actually, I am a political and news junkie.

I have been a fan of C-SPAN and Brian Lamb for 5 or 6 years after discovering BookTV one lazy Saturday afternoon when I was looking for something to watch as I settled down for a winter nap. I started noticing how the news coverage of what happened on the Hill was strikingly different than what actually transpired during debate or how sound bites could be used out of context to bolster any position. So I became intrigued with getting my information first hand.

My impression is that C-SPAN is always willing to take advantage of new technology. The first I heard about the new XM-To Go portable was on some C-SPAN program when Brian Lamb was announcing the roll-out of C-SPAN radio. Their coverage of the party conventions confirms what I always believed.

When I posted a twitter message about watching the Saddleback Presidential forum on C-SPAN I received a message inviting me to watch the coverage on the C-SPAN Convention Hub. I'm hooked!




From Techcrunch:

But today C-SPAN gets fairly cool with the launch of two new sites dedicated to the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver and Republican Convention in Minneapolis. ...links for DNC08 and RNC08. Both are similarly formatted sites that incorporate citizen journalism via blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Qik into portals to cover convention and related news. They will complement the existing C-SPAN Politics.

Third party blog content from sites like Huffington Post, Instapundit, Gateway Pundit, RedState, etc. will be incorporated into the site and Twitter messages marked with hash marks #RNC08 or #DNC08 will also appear on the site (with moderation). C-SPAN employees will be given Qik cameras to record the action when not on main camera.

All in all, it’s a great effort to spice up coverage with user-generated, up-to-the-minute content. This may not make the cable channel more watchable, but political nuts will definitely want to bookmark the sites. It may have the most up to date news on the conventions.

What Else Can Go Wrong?

The last couple of weeks are not ones I want to relive any time soon. Not only have they been immensely frustrating days but the time wasted is not insignificant and with the number of things needing to be done according to my detailed schedule I have felt my already mounting stress level going off the charts.

To begin with, after Paragraphs survived Hurricane Dolly, our basement in Colorado was flooded during a freak thunderstorm. Wading through the water and looking out the basement window, where the water was flowing into the basement from the flooded window well, I was reminded of an aquarium, except instead of fish we had a few surprised spiders wondering where this deluge had come from and trying to locate a piece of bark or some other saving ark.

Anyway, I spent several days understanding - admittedly on a smaller scale - and undertaking recovery efforts similar to my friends on the island. Getting rid of several inches of water, bleaching the walls and floors, tearing up water-soaked carpet and rounding up all the fans I could find, filled several days with unneeded hassle but eventually things were beginning to look up and I was ready to return to bookstore tasks.

Of course, when it goes bad it just goes bad!! When I turned on my laptop last Thursday morning, happy to be back on track and looking forward to thinking about Paragraphs, I was met with a black screen and a little blinking cursor in the corner. I had believed my days of DOS screens were over - but here it was just sitting and blinking like the old days - except I couldn't get any response, try as I might. Add to this frustration, the sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized that I had backed up a Quicken file after preparing this years taxes, but a complete backup was something I had neglected.

So I spent a day going through all the motions, trying to recover, repair, restore all to no avail. Finally, after a call to tech support, which left me in an even more agitated state, I resorted to taking my failing brain to my local independent computer guru. The diagnosis was a failed hard drive with a poor prognosis of data recovery. Now I know why this old machine had been making so much noise the last few months. But of course the constant grinding and whirring wasn't enough to prompt me to take the precaution of backing up this obviously overworked hard drive.

I did have some remaining hope - my email was safely archived on Google's server in the sky and my addresses, phone numbers, calendars, passwords and log-in information, booklists, and myriad other details were safely stored on my trusty Treo. This also meant that I was not completely shut off from the world. Until...

Saturday morning the unthinkable happened. My phone decided to crash. At this point I decided that there is something to be said for pencil and paper and I am still wondering if the advantages of technology are actually worth it, when faced with the trauma created when it refuses to cooperate.

Luckily, the guys at Action computers realized my nerves were shot, and they returned my laptop yesterday instead of the 5 days which Comp USA would have required so I am beginning the arduous task of reloading application software and determining what all I actually did lose. I have also recovered much of the data from my phone although it still seems to have a problem which may require professional help.

All in all, tomorrow should be the beginning of another day and hopefully circumstances will allow me to return to those tasks which are on my to do list. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

Something New - Should I Twitter?

I have noticed the Twitter widget on a number of blogs lately. It seems there is no end to the gadgets, widgets and places where people are setting up social networks. I barely have time to read the few blogs I find particularly interesting and while I am always thinking to myself, "I want to blog about that," or composing blog posts in my mind as a way of outlining and clarifying my thoughts, the time never seems to be available to get the writing done. I know there is a way to make a blog post from my mobile phone, but I have as yet not been able to do this very efficiently or successfully.

I have been trying to find an effective means of garnering all these fleeting thoughts in one place, similar to what many of the early Americans did by keeping a commonplace. They would copy sections from books which they found relevant, thought-provoking, or selections which they liked and wanted to remember. These journals would also include personal reflections and ideas relating to the individuals reading or experiences.

So, when I read this in The Daily Dish I was intrigued.

John Dickerson makes the case for Twitter journalism:

We can all agree that journalism shouldn't get any smaller, but Twitter doesn't threaten the traditions of our craft. It adds, rather than subtracts, from what we do. As I spend nearly all of my time on the road these days reporting on the presidential campaigns, Twitter is the perfect place for all of those asides I've scribbled in the hundreds of notebooks I have in my garage from the campaigns and stories I've covered over the years. Inside each of those notebooks are little pieces of color I've picked up along the way. Sometimes these snippets are too off-topic or too inconsequential to work into a story. Sometimes they are the little notions or sideways thoughts that become the lede of a piece or the kicker. All of them now have found a home on Twitter.

I think I may have to give Twitter a try. What I find particularly inviting is the possibility to use my mobile phone, which I have available much more often than I am near the computer or have access to a pencil and paper. This may be the answer to sharing my thoughts on books I have read without needing to write a full review.