shelbinator.com

I should’ve done this for my colleagues covering Denver, but I didn’t. Get over it, I was busy, and frankly most of the interesting stuff for the DNC was on C-SPAN. So far this Republican convention is a real snoozer, and it’s the protests and such outside that make it exciting. There are five or six Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 types running amok in Minneapolis with Nokia N95s doing the live-streaming thing like we did on Super Tuesday — now joined by the impressive ranks of TheUptake.org (using Qik, not Flixwagon) and even good old C-SPAN themselves, going the mojo route.

Unfortunately there’s no handy “group” feature for the Flixwagon coverage like the Qikkers have, so to see if any of the five streamers have new content, you have to visit all five of their pages individually (direct links to the videos have been disabled by Flixwagon for MTV’s purposes so auto-tweeting won’t work {they figured it out, even though the vids are on a separate subdomain}), and on a Flux-built site that takes way too long. So, for my own purposes and maybe even yours, I’m embedding all five (well, four, till Erica America gets her N95) Flixee widgets on a single page over here.

Where else to be for a speech this big but Manuel’s Tavern? After a quick stop a Verve Lounge to verify there was indeed not enough light (or quiet) to shoot satisfactory video, I headed to Manuel’s in time to wedge myself into a corner between a couple tables and ration my oxygen. Thirty-four Street Team ‘08 punks were at watch parties across the country to collect the ever-prized “youth reaction” on video, turn it around overnight on the Viacom servers and hope for inclusion on Friday night’s MTV News special, Choose or Lose: Obama Decoded.

I have no idea what “decoded” is supposed to mean. If you needed a lot of help breaking down the messages in the speech, perhaps a federal ballot is a bit dangerous of a weapon in your hands. And strictly speaking, in data terms, it was encoded and compressed, but now I’m just being nitpicky. The point is, out of something like 115 choice snippets of interviews, two got chosen and the rest of us are losers in the game of life. About 13 other interviews (if three instances of giving one’s name and age count) were provided by the “real” reporters from Denver, while political expert WaPo reporter Chris Cillizza (who thinks I live in my parents’ basement^*) got four 15-second clips to explain complex politics to the yout’s.

Anyway, rather than let all this footage rot in the trash, here’s what I got (including some of the famous Qik footage mentioned below), with apologies to my interviewees for the trouble.

(Quicktime format)

* Technically I don’t, but apparently that’s the best place for me to dissertate, sadly enough.

Back on Super Tuesday, our intrepid Alaska Street Team ‘08 reporter Dani Carlson was one of the 22 Flixwagon-enabled mobile reporters. Well trekking around on the tundra, she got some sit-down time with our latest vice presidential nominee, Gov. Sarah Palin:

The MTV News reprise highlights one of the more fun moments of the interview:

In this interview, Palin calls controversial Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul “cool.” “He’s a good guy,” she added. “He’s so independent. He’s independent of the party machine. I’m like, ‘Right on, so am I.’ ”

That occurs around the 3:00 mark of the video clip. She also praised Romney (apparently for wanting to drill in ANWR) and had nothing to say about McCain (who back then was against it).

Apparently CNN’s internet reporter found my cellphone coverage of the hearty crowd reactions from the overflowing Manuel’s Tavern interesting enough to put on her big shiny screen. Bhaskar Roy, co-founder of Qik — whose software I used to stream video from Manuel’s (because frankly I wasn’t all that caught up in the speech) — sent me a couple snapshots of someone’s TV after he, and a number of local tweeple, were all a-twitter about the segment. I was totally oblivious (no one in Manuel’s noticed and said “Hey, that’s us! And that’s that guy!”).

That’s fellow YDAtlien Justi in the corner of the second pic.

They must’ve had slim pickin’s in the blogosphere at 11:42 p.m. (judging by the sudden simultaneous influx to the blog of people googling “shelbinator”), because the video ain’t all that interesting. But for posterity, here it is:

There’s a view from the back bar here, too.

In January 2008, at the beginning of the primary election season, Sen. Barack Obama addressed the congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. King was a pastor of Ebenezer 45 years ago today, when he delivered his "I have a dream" speech during the march on Washington, August 28, 1963. Tonight, 45 years later to the day, Sen. Obama formally accepts the nomination of the Democratic party for president — the first African-American to be nominated by a major party.

Talk a walk with me through the childhood neighborhood of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Video page.)

Well, that was awesome. After what was a pretty crafty campaign to suck up a bunch of phone numbers for their SMS campaigns by promising to tell their supporters the inside scoop on the VP nom-noms, the Obama campaign rode the fail-whale all the way to Textland by playing the tease out too damn long. Even though everyone from here to Mars figured Friday afternoon would be a good time to send out the most coveted SMS since Willy Wonkas golden tickets, somewhere somehow someone on in the campaign figured they could milk it just a little bit longer.

You know, they figured that nobody would notice the Secret Service heading to Delaware to escort my boy Joey B to a chartered jet that had been sent from Chicago.

And then, as if to beat only the rooster, they started cranking out the texty goodness around 3am, rousting folks from their sleep like it wasn’t already old news. Well, that’s what you get for not thinking to text “STOP” to 62262 before you go to sleep.

It’s 3 a.m. and your phone is beeping…

(Quicktime)

After waiting all afternoon for a non-existent text message from Barack, I’ll be smugly pleased if this new-media stunt is rendered totally moot by the time it comes out. If ABC and CNN are both saying the Secret Service is on its way to Wilmington, I’m taking that as all the news we need.

So before I go to bed I thought I’d re-post this old video. If you’ve been under a rock and want to know a little bit more about Joe Biden without subjecting yourself to the overly earnest pretense of cable news punditry, here’s a highlights reel from South Carolina stumps I put together last Spring. It oughta give you some sense of salient policy points and general demeanor.

(Quicktime)

A gay British Obama volunteer hopes to survive a Texas gun range while an Atlanta Clinton delegate looks forward to lots of happy hours despite relying on a cramped chemical toilet.

Sounds like a road trip to me.

Here’s the video from the Unity Express send-off Sunday, as six Democrats packed into a wee RV and started the long, winding trip to Denver, registering voters and taking in the sights along the way.

On Anderson Cooper’s AC360 the other night, the panel discussing “veepstakes” turned their attention to Joe Biden for a bit. The producers threw some b-roll footage of the senator on the screen showing him shaking hands with voters while being filmed by a devastatingly handsome citizen journalist you might recognize lingering in the background of the shot.

Funny thing is, that footage was filmed at the breakfast meeting of the Anderson County Democratic Party in Anderson, SC. You think they chose that particularly self-promoting clip on purpose?