A few random tidbits from Micah and I as the second day of YearlyKos winds down (well, as the sessions wind down…)

Micah: Ironic that today’s front page post on DailyKos about the goings-on hear at YearlyKos, titled “A Compendium of Yearly Kos News,” focuses solely on Big Media coverage of the event. The folks here may be building an alternative media system, but sometimes they seem awfully obsessed with what the Big Boys are saying, rather than emulating the technosphere and just ignoring them and uplifting their own daily observers and analysts.

Josh: Ari Melber hosted a panel of journalists and journalist/bloggers made up of Glenn Greenwald of Salon, Mike Allen from the Politico, Time’s Jay Carney, and Jill Filipovic, who writes for the Huffington Post and on her own blog at Feministe.us. Allen, a traditional journalist, seems to “get it” in that he recognizes the symbiotic relationship between blogs and the mainstream media — the two are starting to do each other’s jobs. “Blogs are doing more of the reporting, and newspapers are connecting more of the dots,” he said. Greenwald was a powerful, moralistic speaker. Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe inspired him to start blogging in 2005. But all Savage really did, Greenwald said, was look at the public record of what the White House was doing, and report on it. Savage won the pulitzer because, according the Boston Globe’s editor, “he covered what the White House does, not what it says.” This ought to be the fundamental element, the floor, of political journalism, not something that wins Pulitzers, said Greenwald.

Micah: For a community that prides itself on its lateral, hypernetworked conversations online, it’s a bit startling how traditional their behavior is at most of the sessions here. Four or five or six people on a podium do most of the talking and the audience sits mostly silently, facing them. Very few have their laptops open, too…

Josh: I’ve noticed the same thing. The thing about sites like Kos is that they’re structured in part to allow people to connect and interesting bits to bubble up from the bottom. You would think that they’d consider structuring a conference in a similar way — building off of the unconference model that, in my experience, can be successful at including more people and making the conference much more bearable.

Micah: On the other hand, the many bloggers who are here are obviously soaking up all the opportunities for some rare face-to-face interaction…take Chris Bowers of OpenLeft.com, who notes that he is “obviously finding it difficult to produce content while attending Yearly Kos. Strange how these blogger conferences seem to actually slow the blogosphere down, at least for a little while.”

Josh: Some people fondly recall their favorite moments from a conference. Dania Audax writes that her least favorite moment at YearlyKos was “being brushed off by Amy [Rubin] of the Edwards campaign.” She wanted to interview Rubin for ePluribus Media, but had a hard time getting her attention. When she finally did, Rubin told her she’d pass her information on to Elizabeth Edwards. Obama and Hillary’s people weren’t helpful either, she wrote, which just made her more depressed. One conclusion Audax took away: “The staff of the candiates who attended YearlyKos were not briefed on how to handle bloggers, no matter how in touch they say they are with the netroots. Just because I’m wearing a ‘Worse than Watergate’ t-shirt, doesn’t mean I don’t expect professionalism.”

Micah: It appears that the debate between Obama and Clinton and the other candidates over foreign policy is likely to continue, as Obama’s campaign just released a memo from senior adviser Samantha Power arguing that he is challenging the conventional wisdom about foreign policy in a number of ways. It will be interesting to see how this plays out at tomorrow’s candidates forum.

Josh: Samantha Power? That Samantha Power, who wrote A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide?

Micah: Yes. She is one of his advisors.

Micah: In the New News panel with Sidney Blumenthal, I happened to poke my head in just as one of the speakers was singling out New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg, who was sitting in the room, for having literally just started blogging. The hundred or so people in the room applauded the news. WTF?

Josh: [head explodes]