Be careful what you wish for. Bloggers always want to be taken seriously and placed on an equal footing with the other media. Well, that wish has become reality for the bloggers accredited for the Republican National Convention. The only trouble is, as…

This is where the GOP stinks they are too close to big media. And explains why I cant get them to break the cord that binds them.

I have contacted dozens of GOP campaigns about hiring for them. I basically get told I can volunteer for them for fre and do many hours of work for tham.

There is no free lunch GOP in campaigns. Stop running your campaigns like highschool plays.

William Amos on July 31, 2008 at 5:02 PM

Bwahahaha!

Hey Snappy, maybe they didn’t like your mobius strip of a website. Maybe you have no qualifications. Maybe you should engage your gag reflex before you drown in anti-MSM KoolAid.

Even worse than the most biased liberal networks are the ill-informed conservatives who spout anti-media bias with zero credibility or facts to support their rants.

What on God’s green Earth do you mean by the GOP is too close media?

I would bet next month’s salary that you have NEVER uncovered a piece of news that was not already scooped, packed and sold by hundreds of other media outlets.

You know nothing about gathering information and disseminating it. You essentially turn facts to nursery rhymes when you saddle them with your poor understanding.

Name one thing you can do better than even the leftest news corps. Just one. Butt-thumbing yourself does not count…MSNBC wins that one hands down thumbs up.

//white gloves meet face

I don’t like handouts. I don’t think HA needs them.

Donate to your candidate. Donate to the RNC…unless you’re withholding funds on principle. Donate to a local food bank. Donate your time to some kid who can’t read.

Definitely support HotAir.com by visiting sponsor sites and spending money. But this talk of handouts for people to do their job(s) is meant for huffpo, du, etc.

So Ed, be forewarned, take along spare batteries for your laptop and your wireless internet card.

Good thing you’re here.

Have you considered Carrier Pidgins? They were in use as late as 1945 by members of the press to get messages from the front lines to the rear areas. Perhaps you could have a bag full of Pidgins and then tie flash drives to them and send them home?

It’s an old school idea. It’s just crazy enough it might work. You’ll have to let us know how the group responds to the idea of Lieberman being the VP. Another crazy idea that just might work. It would certainly sew up the Maverick Loving vote.

Snake307 on August 1, 2008 at 3:49 AM

Presumably you’re referring to RFC 1149, IP over Avian Carrier.

Although good for layman initial sticker shock, several people have already pointed out that a) the rates aren’t really out of line for the type of event/venue; and b) that the ’small’ 10Meg pipe is a HUGE amount of bandwidth with respect to supporting the activity of blogging – even with a moderate amount of video clip upload/download. You might start to see lag if you had a number of people doing something live (webcam/skype, etc), but it would be a few.

Which brings up the other point that a couple of others seem to have hinted, but not said directly – that what you’re describing, Ed, seems to be a fantastic entrepreneurial opportunity in the finest tradition of free market capitalism.

Sure. One of the bloggers getting credentialed for the convention pops for the 10Meg line. He takes along a simple switch, and a WiFi box. At the convention, he sets up shop, and sells access to his secured WiFi access point right there on blogger row. Charge a daily rate and an event rate. Cut off subscriptions when either you’ve paid for the investment, or the number of subscribers starts to ’slow down’ the connection.

Of course, be sure to document everything thoroughly, so you can itemize the entire venture for tax purposes, treating the cost as a business expense.

C’mon, Ed. . .you are covering the GOP convention.

I’m more concerned about the other bloggers who will spend a fortune getting here, and then wonder if they can even do the work they intended. I wanted to give them a heads-up before the sticker shock convinced them not to come.

I was just trying to provide context for people who don’t work with this stuff everyday.

It’s an old school idea. It’s just crazy enough it might work. You’ll have to let us know how the group responds to the idea of Lieberman being the VP. Another crazy idea that just might work. It would certainly sew up the Maverick Loving vote.

Diogenes of Sinope on July 31, 2008 at 11:51 PM
Diogenes of Sinope on August 1, 2008 at 12:25 AM

Dude, chill. The point (or so it seems to me) was not so much to cry foul as to point out something that seems at least borderline ludicrous and laugh at it. If anything, the fact that the bloggers receive the same boilerplate (as you so accurately called it) is a sign that they have arrived as a news-type service. Yeah, it sucks to pay those prices, but there are reasons for them which have been exhaustively pointed out and laughed at. It was a fun post, not meant to get us whipped into a torchlight and pitchfork frenzy!

BTW, the engineers need to hijack another thread. All this geology and IT speak is making me twitch! (Who am I kidding, I’m loving it!)

When you buy bandwidth at home you get ASYMMETRICAL speeds, ie ungodly DOWNLOAD speed but basically zero upload speed… That is to say you couldn’t run servers or stream data, it would be way too slow.

UPLOAD speed is VERY expensive. Consider the “industry standard” T1 line. It is a measly 1.54MB –slow by cable modem standards– but businesses pay usually about $400-600 a month for it because it is SYMMETRICAL, it uploads at 1.5 also.

A T3 (45meg) is about $2800 a month with a ~$800 set-up fee and 2 year commitment so $7,600 for a 100mb one time deal installed is not a horrible price.

Call your local telco and tell them you need 10MB SYMMETRICAL and see what they quote you. – Then this whole thing will be clear to you.

As I said above, this is the same boilerplate they send the network guys. No big deal.

There is no blogger on the planet wondering where he was gonna get himself a 1 Gig line at the convention… that’s the sort of thing only the broadcast network guys need. — Even the smallest (10meg) line is about 40X the upload speed of the typical home “high speed” line. — Way more than any blogger would request.

The rates are reasonable in the business… it’s just that you ain’t the target customer.

The “story” here is that bloggers got a form letter that they used for the other media too. – big deal

You should have blogged “WOW, look what the big media pays to cover these events.”

upinak on July 31, 2008 at 5:57 PM
Mooseman on July 31, 2008 at 6:02 PM
Wow. We have geologists here?

Me? I finished two years, never got around to the other two, as life intervened.

Plate tectonics was my favorite… better than sex! (At least at my house)

Spherical trig, anyone? lol

wccawa on July 31, 2008 at 6:13 PM

Did I mention I used to be a schoolbus driver?

Let’s see: 1,000,000 characters per second, that’s 3,333 5-character words a minute or 33 bloggers typing 100 words per minute continuously…

Another way to look at it is Ed would have to submit this blog (~4000 characters) post 250 times a second in order to saturate the line.

GOP is sucking with new media….