Looking through the New York Times on-line this morning, I discovered “Bloggingheads”: a library of videos featuring a split screen discussion between two people. The feature is not unique to the NYT, but comes from a Blogginghead’s web-site.
I’m thinking that this general format could be used in political campaigns. I’d like to see candidates for political office engage each other in web-based discussions. In fact, I think it would be great, if we could Bring Back Lincoln Douglas Style Debates To Today’s Campaigns using this technology.
I want to investigate how DaytonOS might organize on-line debates for local candidates in this election — candidates for the State Assembly, County Sheriff, County Commission, and U.S. Congress. Posting a debate on-line would give the opportunity for extended dialogue between the debate participants and viewers.
Here is what Wikipedia says: “Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers. The site was started by the journalist Robert Wright (The Moral Animal) and the blogger and former journalist Mickey Kaus on November 1, 2005.[1] (Kaus has since dropped out of operational duties of the site as he didn’t want his frequent linking to be seen as a conflict of interest.[2]) Most of the earlier discussions posted to the site involved one or both of those individuals, but since has grown to include a total of more than 150 other individual contributors, mostly journalists, scientists, authors, well known political bloggers, and other notable individuals.
“Unregistered users are able to view all of the videos which are contained on the site, while free registration is required to comment on the individual discussions, or participate in the forums.”
Robert Wright, left, of Bloggingheads.tv and Daniel Gross of Newsweek debate whether homebuyers can be protected from their own bad judgment.
