Scoble gets it too… Too much hype and too little readers in the end have little to no effect on the outcome of the races.

Interesting evening in American politics. You know where to go for the story, if you care.

Watching the political blogs is pretty interesting, though. Lots of theories as to why Dean fell, and why Edwards did so well. A hint in the polling: TV.

That takes me back to my college years when I covered Bill Clinton on campus. After the event, I was sitting in San Jose State's bar, talking with Clinton's team. The news came on. The bartender asked "you want me to turn up the sound?" The team says "nah, it only matters how he looks on TV -- what he says isn't that important."

Very cynical, I know, but in a poll result I heard on the radio on the way home tonight they said that 75% liked Kerry's and Edwards' TV ads, but only 45% liked Dean's.

It still comes down to TV.

Speaking of which, John Edwards is on CSPAN right now. He looks good on TV. Much better than Dean.

Along these lines, by tomorrow, I'm sure there'll be more than one person that will gnash their teeth and write "weblogs failed Dean."

Well, the weblog hype did get overboard the past few weeks. Weblogs do matter. Why? The influentials read weblogs. The press. The insiders. The passionate ones.

But, the average Joe doesn't read these. Come on, be real. Instapundit gets, what, 100,000 to 200,000 visitors a day? I get 2,000. That's a small little dinky number in a country of 290 million.

Weblogs and online technologies have helped Dean and others collect a lot of money, but you still gotta have a TV persona that hits home. Just reality in 2004. I'm not bitter about that.

The lessons for big-company evangelism (or small company, for that matter) are the same. If your product isn't something that average people like, it doesn't matter how good the weblogs are.

OK, enough politics for a while.

Now back to geek stuff.

[The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]