What does God (or Howard Dean) Need With A Starship (or Blog-Hit)?

As I continue to think about Howard Dean's guest-blogging of Lessig's blog, I'm bothered by something. To put it as a pop-cliche, "What does God need with a starship?". Or, more prosaically, WHY does a presidential candidate be a guest-blogger?

People write blogs for a mixture of reasons (these aren't exhaustive or exclusive):

1) To write about their life (gossip, friends)
2) To write about their ideas (lawyers, policy-makers, columnist punditry)
3) To write about other's ideas (portals, reporting punditry)

Where does this guest-appearance fit? Is it thought of by the Dean campaign as akin to doing a talk-show? "You're on TV with Oprah at 2, Radio with Larry King at 5, and in-between, an Internet guest-shot on The Lessig Blog."

There's nothing wrong with that. And I suppose it's a milestone of sorts when candidates make net appearances, an indication of campaign worthiness.

But then it mean much less than many people think it does. Not zero, but much closer to zero (another media appearance) than infinity (revolutionary democracy by Internet blogging).

By Seth Finkelstein | posted in cyberblather , politics | on July 14, 2003 05:44 PM (Infothought permalink) | Followups