shelbinator.com

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?

On Memorial Day, I always remember my maternal grandfather, Captain Edward F. Zimmerman, MD, USN, who served on the USS Shasta during World War II. Thoughts of him are usually accompanied by a twinge of regret that I didn’t follow in his footsteps in naval service, a career decision I am still trying to “atone” for. So this Memorial Day weekend, the words of Under Secretary of Defense John Young, Jr., who spoke at Georgia Tech last Friday morning, were welcome and reassuring.

Continue reading this post at ThinkMTV…

So this is the internet, huh? Well who do I need to shag to get ahead around here?

Alright, I don’t think I need to go that far. But I wonder if I need a better brand. The last few weeks have been pretty good for me and the internet, but my successes also just seem to serve to highlight in stark relief how much further I have to go.

Last week I went to the Intel ISEF’08 to shoot some video and do some of that citizen journalism stuff, after being contacted by New Media Strategies. The big old-school PR firm Burson-Marsteller (a name it took me all week to remember) was doing the bulk of publicity for ISEF’08, but NMS got pulled in by Intel (as I understand it) to make sure all the web bases were covered as well. Now, I was thrilled that NMS thought I was one of the right people to talk to for the job (hi, rocket scientist). However, had they not been referred to me by our local media commentator SpaceyG, I might have missed out entirely. Many thanks to SpaceyG for the referral, but the puzzle for me is, at what point do I escape the risk of going totally undiscovered save for the favor of the well-connected?

Now that ISEF is over (though my video-editing work is not), there are the thanks and the pats on the back and the connecting with each other on LinkedIn after a project well executed. And on LinkedIn you have that whole Recommendation thing going on — something I’ve never enjoyed yet but is starting to look pretty handy. Say, I think, maybe if I can get a Recommendation from NMS on LinkedIn, the next time someone’s looking for an aerospace geek to shoot video (naturally), I might show up on their radar! And that’s when I realized I had this problem:

I need a brand.

Where might NMS put a recommendation for me on LinkedIn? In case you haven’t messed around with LinkedIn at all, their system likes to file recommendations under the associated job title that the recommendee was operating as at the time. So if I wanted to recommend my primary NMS contact as a new media PR firecracker, I would select that NMS job title on her profile as opposed to the one she’s got listed for her other job on the side, with jess3.com.

But on my end, the only remotely relevant job title I’ve got listed is the MTV Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 gig. And frankly, I don’t really want to have any and every recommendation of my new media work filed under MTV. I was already doing this stuff and already had a style well before I ever encountered the sea of paperwork and red tape that is Viacom. The pieces that I produce for them are necessarily less creative and fun (for me and you) than I would naturally produce, so I went to ISEF primarily as shelbinator and not the guy from Choose or Lose with the stack of release forms and inability to turn on my microphone in the presence of ambient music.

That’d be an even bigger conundrum should my friend Emily want to promote my services. On a tight schedule and zero budget, I knocked out a basic but passable web presence — including video — for her campaign to be an Obama-pledged delegate to the DNC convention. She didn’t win the district-level race, but she’s in for an at-large position, due in part, it turns out, to the key guy at Obama’s HQ in Chicago being thoroughly impressed with her video and website. Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’d like to start keeping track of, but again, there’s even less of a category on my LinkedIn profile for that to be filed under.

So why isn’t shelbinator.com on LinkedIn?

Tessa of DriveaFasterCar.com has her website listed on LinkedIn, with herself as Editor & Blogger, but that blog is in essence her business (after hours, anyway): it promotes local music and other artistic happenings. Similarly, Rusty and Amber list themselves as co-founders of the Georgia Podcast Network, so if they help you record an event, for instance, you know where to recommend their work. But shelbinator.com, well, it’s kind of a mess.

First of all, there’s my love-hate relationship with the name itself. Let’s face it: it’s kind of immature. It sounds kind of like that tool at the office, “makin’ some copies.” And I’m not entirely sure it’s all that appropriate — or that I even want — to be promoting it as a professional brand. I’d eventually like to do Very Serious Things with my career beyond online messaging, and if you have just as hard a time imagining Deputy Asst. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Shelbinator as I do, well, you know what I mean.

On the other hand, Robert Scoble is arguably among the most influential tech bloggers out there and Scobleizer is just as douchey a handle as Shelbinator. It’s also hard to just cast off the existing brand investment: I’ve been writing under this handle for almost nine years now, starting from badly hand-coded HTML on the defunct Xoom.com. It’s been cited by a presidential campaign, much to my shock and chagrin, and I think it’s finally picking up some currency.

Okay, not that much currency. I’m still incapable of standing on my own without the gatekeepers of internet greatness. That long, geeky tutorial on connecting an external mic to the N95 brought one of my biggest traffic spikes in ages, but I can still hardly take the credit for it. Not that there was much to take credit for: that Finnish Bloggerguy had the right approach in his video, but he wasn’t too clear on the particular connectors and apparently his Scandinavian cable used a different color-coding scheme. I just corrected and clarified his approach for the US market, something I can’t believe no one else managed to do the whole time they were clamoring for a fix from Nokia. (Like they say, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, but it helps.) Mobile Jones wrote a post about her long quest for a solution finally coming to and end at my blog, and what happens? MobileActive.org Twitters about how Mobile Jones has the answer on her blog, and a mobile-tech blog carnival does pretty much the same thing. Steve Garfield, the rather prolific videoblogger in Boston, republished the solution on his blog giving thanks and a link to my original post — and his commenters come along with kudos for him, “Great stuff, Steve!” Even the Nashua Telegraph, whose web team hopes to use the N95 for some mobile journalism, links to my post, MoJo’s, and Steve’s in quick succession as “a few tutorials on the web,” as if they are indeed a few tutorials and not one tutorial and two posts about it.

Pardon me while I have a brief Tracy Flick moment. I’m sorry, but it’s been four months since I took you live inside an Iowa caucus (and ten since the YouTube debate) and I’m still getting my internet ass kicked by a life-caster who didn’t realize that Super Tuesday had already happened when talking about the MTV-Flixwagon connection.

So, the word shelbinator doesn’t exactly conjure up anything, and maybe that’s part of the problem. ISEF was also covered by Geek Dad over at Wired.com, but right away you kind of know where he’s coming from. There’s also the “proper noun” problem: shelbinator is me more than it is the body of my work, and part of my branding issue is that I’m trying to pimp that work as much as (or more than) myself. A couple other MTV Street Teamers used to add their brand to the end of their stories, but they had studio names separate from themselves: Corduroy Media and a Xolografik Production. That model just doesn’t seem to work with my current eponymous brand, so maybe I need a studio, someplace you would think to go for video and related communications work.

I took a decent step in that direction, brand-wise, when I stepped down from the Communications post at Young Dems of Atlanta. I wanted to keep working in online communications for progressive candidates and nonprofits, but I made the mistake of thinking I could learn enough Drupal to launch a major multi-user community website while still working on grad school and having a life. Thus, smarterasses.org was aborted in the first trimester, but its logo lives on in the corner of my homemade business cards:

That’s a fairly self-explanatory brand name with a logo to match, wouldn’t you say? Unfortunately, it’s also not something I feel like saying if I’m calling someone important on the phone. “Uh, Senator, it’s some…uh… smartass person calling about your web video?” That was meant to be a site for scrappy bloggers, not someone who wants to work on presidential campaigns. Next idea!

I’ve already rambled on so long now that I’ve lost any semblance of a train of thought, but I have even more questions yet to consider.

• Is it really a content problem? Maybe I just cant get out of double-digit subscribers because I suck. I contemplate that likelihood a lot, but then some complimentary schmuck has to come along and say they really like my work. It’s been suggested, on the other hand, that it’s just too much for one site: is it politics, or is it technology? Unfortunately, I’m not willing to concede on that front just yet. There are plenty of tech bloggers and plenty of political bloggers; I happen to be a quasi-rocket scientist in politics doing citizen journalism and I’m going to try my best to stand at — and report on — the intersection of those paths.
• Is it just a container problem? Would I be well-served by creating a new, clean space for some kind of “portfolio” of the things I might be able to contribute to your project or campaign? This might, at the same time, be a way to create a fairly dedicated channel for the citizen journalism and/or campaign messaging product around here (i.e., mostly the videos) — like, say, shelbinator.tv, or shelbination.com — while leaving the rambly and ranty at shelbinator.com. Granted, this would do nothing to solve my problem of not being able to crack triple-digit authority or get under a 100K ranking at Technorati as far as this blog is concerned.
• So then is there a new brand that would package it all properly? Do I just need to clarify the point of what’s going on around here and give it a proper name that would lend itself better to brand identification? Is the whole shelbinator concept a dead horse?
• What the hell am I going on about? Is anyone still actually reading?

Fear not, I probably won’t subject you to a follow-up post along these lines. But if there’s anyone still here, please do chime in.

There’s a giant green and yellow swath of ick rolling over Georgia on the animated radar right now, so there’s really no point in trying to wait it out before donning cheap rain gear and riding through the slop on a bike not built for weather. Giddyup.

Then after a few productive hours in the lab where I seem to have a biaxial extensometer finally up and running, it’s off to another conference — this one, luckily, just around the corner and not up in Kennesaw.

This event is a first-of-its-kind meeting to bring together up-and-coming journalists, established news-hounds, acclaimed academics, technology and media executives, Internet influencers and many others to discuss how new computing technologies will shape and reshape the news business for generations to come.

I know you’re jealous.

I’m back from my wintry travels, trying to re-acclimate to my graduate studies, and trying to figure out once again this whole work-life balance going forward.

And I’m still hacking up small bits of lung that withered and died in the single-digit Iowa air.

I’ve even gotten all my new cables, connectors, and tiny gizmos sorted and stored in individually marked plastic zip-top bags, which I think will be a key element of carrying around the one-person television production studio in my new backpack and not leaving anything behind when the story is done.

Last Monday night, I met my 50 other Street Team ‘08 cohorts and got quite a bit of pep talk from the president of MTV, the VP of MTV News, and our new producers. After loading us up with wine and snacks, they loaded us up with enough gear to make a U.S. Marine remember boot camp and sent us back to the hotel. There’s the Canon SD1000 for stills (the same model I already carry everywhere); a nice Panasonic 3-chip camcorder (consumer, not pro-sumer…we need to remain portable, you know); shotgun mic; an external hard drive the size of a Bible for footage; and a laptop the size of a boogie board (Dell, not MBP, but hey), all jammed into a spiffy and very comfortable backpack with our Choose or Lose Street Team ‘08 logos embroidered thereupon.

Day one of orientation started off with more legal jargon than you could shake a stick at, and right off the bat I believe we covered what will in retrospect be discussed with great scrutiny when the evolution-of-media thinkers like Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, and Leonard Witt start the autopsy on MTV and the Knight Foundation’s grand journalistic experiment of 2008. While the press release sang proudly that 51 “citizen journalists” had been hired to cover the election from the local level on up, we have now become something else. Like that catch-22 of quantum mechanics which prevents you from measuring a system without irrevocably altering it, so does hiring a citizen journalist make them not-so-much-a-citizen journalist. Whether that makes us “real” journalists is also a dubious suggestion: if you see me trying to elbow my way through the mainstream press at the John Edwards rally at the IBEW this weekend, take note of just how many of the people with cameras go chasing after every interviewee with a release form to sign. That would be me.

Yes, to appear in my videos — even if it’s because you stepped up to a microphone to ask John Edwards a question, in front of all those people and cameras — you need to sign my Guest Release. Otherwise, it’s the cutting room floor for you. I’m also going to need someone who is authorized to represent the Atlanta IBEW to sign my Location Agreement, saying I have permission to film there. Oh and I have to slap up Cablecast signs at the door, warning the rest of you that you’re wandering into the line of fire. Meanwhile, my MSM rivals will be pointing and laughing at me, who is now neither as credentialed as a “real” journalist, nor as free from restriction as a “citizen” journalist.

So we’ll just see how this goes. I’m sure I’ll become quite deft, before long, at effortlessly obtaining all the signatures and knowing how to shoot the story to avoid too many hurdles in the first place. But it is hard for me, as someone whose role in politics has been, most of the time, to jump up and down and yell “You’re doing it wrong!” about this new media thingamajig in the hope of improving people’s methods, to just ignore that aspect of it. The evolution of media seems to be about relinquishing great degrees of control, which is naturally very scary to the old guard, and the extent to which each organization decides to loosen up on the grip is a big element of how their new forays online pan out. Thus any concern I have about importing old world constraints into new media ventures only arises out of my desire for this whole project to kick ass and take names. I really will be curious to see what the Rosen-Jarvis-Witt types say about this whole model. Hell, I’m curious to see what you think of the operation so far, so why don’t you go poke around and opine about it?

We actually got to hear from Jay Rosen, a co-organizer of my old Off the Bus beat at Huffington Post, on day two. He got us all fired up about thinking about our national versus local beats, and thankfully fired off the occasional chastisement at our new employers to make sure they gave us all the tools we need for this to truly be a new media operation. RSS feeds? Yes plzkthx! (Our blogs and media channels currently lack them…but it’s planned, don’t worry.) Surprise, surprise, my “national beat” — or the overarching theme that will hopefully tie into, and at times stand in for, local Georgia reporting — will be science and technology. We’ll see what kind of prayer I have of making sense out of that.

Legal protocols of videography aside, the overarching message of the whole trip was what an awesome platform we’re setting out to create and how excited our backers (oh, and we the Street Team, too) are about our prospects. Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation told us about pitching the idea of giving a Knight News Challenge Grant to MTV of all networks, and his enthusiasm for the project was infectious, even through some of our hangovers. Just hearing about the hope some very serious backers have for us was a wake-up call for how we’re not in YouTube anymore, Toto.

We also got a great send-off from Keven Roach, executive producer of AP’s online video network, Ron Fournier, former chief political writer for the AP and now their online political editor. Selected pieces of ours will be distributed over the AP’s online network to over 1,800 member sites, which is a huge platform for us and quite the incentive to produce that noteworthy video clip — and they couldn’t have been more excited about this whole venture either (even if it was somewhat muted by 36 straight sleepless hours of New Hampshire primary coverage). It was quite reassuring to get such optimistic words from someone so credible, but we were also warned that with much attention will come much scrutiny, and we’d better thicken up our skin for the inevitable criticism. Ron even brought some advice from other heavy hitters, in the form of a video he compiled while in Des Moines, IA, of advice for us newbies from the likes of Tim Russert, Sam Donaldson, and Andrea Mitchell.

Yeah, I think that was about the time it really sank in what a holy-shit step this was in my online career. Thank God Sen. Biden told me I’d better finish my dissertation at the end of the campaign. Thank Joe Biden, says my mother.

The rest of the Street Team seems pretty cool — even the small handful of Republicans! Well, what do you want, it is MTV after all, so our conservative caucus definitely has the look of a token minority; but I’m sure Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and I believe even Alaska (she’s hard to call) will do you right-wingers proud. The group is split right down the middle in gender, and, as an ever-so-slightly snarky article about our orientation in the Boston Globe says, we even have enough diversity to appeal to “Hispanics, African-Americans, and lesbians.”

She neglected to mention that we are also really, really, incredibly good looking, and do other stuff good, too.

I do still need your help fleshing out my local beat. If you’ve got a story — and you’re willing to sign a Guest Release, damnit — get in touch. There’s a contact link right up at the top of this page. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a notebook with my dissertation thoughts in it somewhere under all this video gear.

What to say about Iowa?

First and foremost, thank you. Not to Iowans in their bizarre political shenanigans and inability not only to be polled but even to bother to get their lazy asses registered as voters prior to caucus night. No, thanks go to those of you who tuned in, made the chat room lively, kept me updated to the conversation via text message, and of course, dropped a little somethin’ in the tip jar. I really appreciated your virtual companionship on the nerve-wracking and ultimately disappointing campaign trail, as I do your assistance in subsidizing that trip of a lifetime.

I also really ought to thank the folks on Joe Biden’s campaign who put their trust in me as a hybrid supporter-citizen journalist and basically threw open their doors and let me pick and choose where I would do some reporting and where I would do some volunteering. The fact that they ever wanted my help with some YouTubery or other online communications efforts over the last several months has really kept me going when I’ve wondered why I’m trying to balance my technically-challenged dissertation and, well, anything that is not dissertation. They were a great bunch of people to work with, even though it was largely over the internets until the last couple of days.

Their trust was made even more special when it survived an ugly Off the Bus episode the morning of the caucus, thanks to the bizarre and unsourced rumor promulgated by one of my OTB cohorts, Beverly Davis. She claimed to have spoken to one of the Biden campaign’s “national consultants” at a bar on New Year’s Eve, and this anonymous source suggested that a deal was in the offing between Biden and Obama, described by Davis in such a way as to make Biden’s campaign for President sound suddenly less serious, more like the speculative “He’s just running for VP” crap that’s always alleged of any second tier candidate. No one at Biden HQ had any idea what “national consultant” Davis might have been speaking to, nor was there any such deal ever in the work; Biden has a fine day job and was in this to do as well as his bluntly stated positions could get him. The story was posted on the 2nd, I believe, and by the time I got to the office on Thursday morning it was already keeping Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach’s blackberry buzzing furiously. Lucky for me, Beverly Davis referred to herself in the aggrandizing institutional third person, saying, “Off the Bus spoke to…” about her drunken gossiper, leaving a tiny grammatical question in a few people’s minds at that morning’s staff meeting. “She didn’t mean Shelby, did she?” That was apparently one fleeting thought that was quickly dismissed — and solidly confirmed when I talked to staff in person. I wasn’t even in Iowa for New Year’s Eve, and they know me well enough by this point to have faith that I wouldn’t run with such speculative crap without confirming it more solidly with someone who knows what the hell they’re talking about. There was a similar moment in Greenville, SC, when the wheels came off the wagon for a few minutes and the whole campaign caravan fractured into several disconnected clusters when the Senator wanted to sneak off for a quiet lunch away from the crowds and the remaining aides lost track of the day’s agenda for a few minutes. I lingered outside the college fair where Biden was supposed to shake hands for a while and his former bodyman and a state committee member tried desperately to reconvene the group via multiple cellphone messages. The latter, not knowing quite who I was (but only seeing my fake press badge), looked askance at me before he was reassured that I could be trusted not to use this perfectly ordinary moment of campaign chaos to write a smear article, or I would under no circumstances be allowed within earshot of these phone calls in the first place.

That kind of trust raises a much broader question about this new-fangled citizen journalism stuff, as was reiterated to me yesterday by Leonard Witt, professor of communications at Kennesaw State University and networked journalism enthusiast. I will be co-hosting a dinner table discussion on politics and new media with our friend Grayson at the upcoming Southern Social Media Convention in a few weeks at Leonard’s request. In our emails I mentioned that while in Iowa I was a sort of hybrid campaign volunteer/embedded reporter, and it was tricky explaining to some people how that worked; he said he, too, would have questions about how that worked, and justifiably so. Just what kind of “journalism” could you expect to get out of me regarding the now defunct Biden campaign? Would I basically be shilling propaganda under the cloak of news? Absolutely not. For the most part, I provided video to Huffington Post, so what you saw is what you got. The text article I wrote about the Greenville trip was basically presenting the mood of the meetings, the policy topics discussed, and even a mention of the caravan’s consistent lateness and my speeding across South Carolina to keep up. I was not blowing sunshine up anyone’s skirt, to butcher a cliche. But there was certainly a lot of trust between me and a campaign I liked, and I was not going to rush to publish something before making sure it was a real story just for the sake of a gotcha. After the Beverly Davis flap, I asked the communications staff what the real deal was and said I’d be interested in publishing my own piece on their response, whether it was a denial or a “no comment” or what have you. The Press Secretary pointed out that Marc Ambinder had already published the official campaign statement on his blog, and that slowly some of the major news outlets were updating their parrot stories appropriately; as far as the campaign was concerned, that was the end of the story. My decision not to follow up on my own was two-fold: first, and most objectively, I had plenty of other things to work on, story-wise, so if Ambinder had already written it up, there was little point in my repeating old news; second, and perhaps biased on my part, if I continued to make a story of the non-story, the non-story would BE the story, and I’d just give legs to what was bunk in the first place. I didn’t want to do that to the candidate I was most fond of, and so to that extent, I was a biased citizen journalist.

So what does that say about citizen journalism? I guess the usual as with any kind of reporter: caveat emptor. In most of these new media outlets, the goal is not to eliminate or stifle bias, as in the old model, but to own up to and publicize it. You want to hear a bunch of pro-Obama fuzzy lovin’? Read just about everyone else on Off the Bus. You want straight coverage of the positive points of second tier brainiacs like Biden? Try me. You want mud? Try Drudge.

For the record, here are some final video clips from Caucus Day that I didn’t have the energy to deal with for a while.

I’m in New York now getting ready for my MTV Choose or Lose ‘08 Street Team orientation, just in time to turn the page. (Expect some more videos this week.) I think with the testing and dissertation writing on the up-slope at school, and MTV reporting probably taking the rest of the time, it’s time to close the Huffington Post chapter. The Bev Davis fiasco was probably all the excuse I needed, anyway.

I’m probably also done with politics for a while. People have already been asking whom I’m for now, while the body was still warm even. Right now, I don’t feel like I’m “for” anyone. I’ll go into a little more detail on my thought processes here when I wrap up this MTV trip, but frankly, the rest of you haven’t got much to wow me with. You never gave the smartest, most qualified guy in the room a chance, so I’m disinclined to give a hoot about your celebrity right now — and I’m definitely not inclined to waste any more graduate school time getting them nominated. Talk to me when we’ve got one polished show horse standing, and I’ll see what I can do.

Now, time to go hemorrhage some cash in Manhattan!

From the PR Newsire this morning:

MTV Taps 51 State-Based Citizen Journalists for “Choose or Lose ‘08″

AP Online Video Network & Top Mobile Carriers to Distribute Weekly “Street Team ‘08″ Reports

Knight Foundation Grant Helps Power Mobile Media Election Coverage Experiment

NEW YORK, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire/ — MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign (http://www.ChooseorLose.com), today unveiled “Street Team ‘08″: a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists — one from every state and Washington, D.C. — who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will contribute weekly, multi-media reports (short form videos, blogs, animation, photos, podcasts) that will be distributed via a soon-to-launch WAP site, MTV Mobile, Think.MTV.com and to the more than 1,800 sites in the Associated Press Online Video Network. Carefully selected by MTV after an extensive nationwide search, the one-of-a-kind press corps will be armed with mobile media like laptops, video cameras and cell phones, and charged with uncovering the untold political stories that matter most to young people in their respective states

…

The “Street Team ‘08″ program is made possible by a $700,000 Knight News Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Knight News Challenge, at http://www.newschallenge.org, is an annual worldwide competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas that use digital media to inform and inspire communities. The Knight Foundation plans to invest at least $25 million over five years in the search for bold community news experiments.

And yes, the punchline is that I am your humble Georgia correspondent citizen journalist. So after 20 hours of online training in Adobe Creative Suite and a two-day orientation in Manhattan next month, I am charged with uncovering the untold stories here in the Peach State.

You know what this means? I mean besides the fact that I’m about to get handed a superfancy new video camera and a (Windows) laptop (please God not Vista) and will be expected to file one story every week (through video, primarily, or text and photos or podcasts or what have you), and that the real shiny stories from the Street Team will get floated up to the MTV cable networks (while the rest remain online), and meanwhile I’ll be getting even less sleep and still have a dissertation to write.

It means I need untold stories. I bet you have stories. You’ve got an issue, a non-profit organization, a candidate, a crusade that you believe in, but you’ve got no platform. Well I’ve got me a very nice platform here, but I’m a little short on causes and crusades. So let’s get your chocolate in my peanut butter, if you know what I mean.

Seriously, who the hell ever thought that was a good advertising campaign for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? And right there is a highlight of one of the first overwhelming challenges this new opportunity presents to me and a handful of other Choose or Lose Street Team members™: Gen X, meet the Millennials. I know the boundaries are pretty hazy, but I’ve seen enough birth year ranges that say I got caught in the last few years of Gen X — and the real point of the matter is that in my frame of reference, getting someone’s peanut butter on your chocolate doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics! Yet now a handful of us CoLSTM’s™, ranging from 29 to 39, are going to have to craft a message a week for an audience that knows “I has a flavor” doesn’t imply the need for prophylactics, either.

I know, that’s a terrible example. See? I can’t even come up with a hip new dirty phrase that is not a sexual euphemism. So while obviously this is all great! and yay! and I’m totally stoked! (see? do kids still say that?) and I’m fired up for this opportunity, that’s also how I’m sure a lot of new Army Rangers feel when they get pinned, and they get their shiny new gun and body armor (sometimes) and night vision goggles and it’s all great! and yay! and then Welcome to Sadr City! and the yay! kinda takes a back seat to adrenaline and trying not to poop.

A representative of the Knight Foundation, which helps fund this project, summarized our call to arms (well, cameras) thusly:

“We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event — the election of a president — matters to young people, and whether or not it matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone,” said Eric Newton, VP/Journalism, Knight Foundation.

And as if to highlight the challenge for the recipients of the Knight News Challenge Grant, MTV issued another press release to the Newswire exactly two hours later:

* The finale of “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” delivered a 5.9 P12-34 rating to become the highest rated series telecast on MTV since August 2005.

* For the night (8PM-11PM), “A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila” finale was the most watched telecast across all of television among P12-34, even out-delivering broadcast.

* “The Hangover” Aftershow at 11PM averaged a strong 3.6 P12-34 rating, ranking right behind the “A Shot At Love” finale as the #2 rated cable telecast for the night.

How many people do you think I’ll be able to pull in to watch my live video coverage of the Iowa caucuses? I mean, without putting on the bikini, ’cause you know it’s pretty cold in Iowa this time of year.

But seriously, send your chocolate over to my peanut butter. We’ll talk.

Yep, I’ve lost my mind. I’m going to Iowa.

I couldn’t resist the ultimate citizen journalism project of the winter, and considering how much time and effort I’ve put into this campaign, I’m not about to miss the champagne corks a-flyin’ when Iowa defies the polls yet again and Biden vaults into contention*. See how much fun they have in Iowa? With the snow and many layers of the clothings?

I’m heading over on the 2nd and coming back on the 4th, so if you’re interested in watching caucus day unfold from the battle front, stay tuned here. I’m bringing the live streaming gear (I may even upgrade to cellular broadband so I can roam beyond free WiFi clouds) and the other camera(s) will be cranking out the occasional YouTube product. I may try to go into an actual caucus — we’ll see — but I’ll probably base myself at the Biden campaign HQ in Des Moines and catch the occasional ride with volunteers to show their final hour ground game (heck, maybe I’ll even help out).

I’ll collect various players and communicative widgets for the trip over on a dedicated page, shelbinator.com/iowa, but it’ll probably wind up here on the front page, too, if I feel like activating a sticky-post plugin.

* Since even at this stage of the game I’m still hearing negative Nancies pull that “doesn’t have a chance” crap, I’ll share this thought from Chris Matthews.

It’s been a while since I actually wrote anything here that remotely engaged you, dear lurker, so today I shall kill two birds with one stone, by asking you for input out of pure laziness.

I need a three-line bio by tomorrow. I am, of course, far too amazing to be contained in such a wee paragraph, so I’m just going to have to make some crap up.

What kind of crap would you make up about me in three lines?

There may be a prize.

In a video posted today, wacky quasi-conspiracy theorist Davis Fleetwood, who was one of YouTube’s guests at the debate in Charleston, reports that he’s been hired by the Kucinich for President campaign, making him, he believes (and I can’t dispute) the first “videoblogger” (whatever that word means) to be hired by a presidential campaign.

See, Ma?

Hope that works out better for him and the campaign than John Edwards’s aborted attempt to hire some opinionated bloggers. But hey, it’s only Dennis Kucinich; what has he got to lose?

On the other hand, people who read the Huffington Post still aren’t interested in videos. Maybe it’s the quiet atmosphere of their office where they’re screwing off by reading political blogs but don’t want to give away the game by playing something with volume. But different audiences are definitely more interested: my Biden interview was over 250 views on the first day just from being posted on a couple of nerdier political blogs by Biden supporters; since it launched on HuffPost, it’s only gotten to the high 300’s, a lot of which is probably still coming from the other blogs and this li’l blog itself. A video that managed to go to press before mine — not that that was hard, considering the way my story spent 30-ish hours in limbo up someone’s keister while several others popped up throughout the day (glad I stayed up so late to get it done) — has only mustered 210 views, despite its association with the big NPR station WNYC. (And half of its traffic is coming from a non-HuffPost website.)

The suspicion only gets reinforced: YouTube is no place for serious politics. YouTube is for setting yourself on fire.

But hey, setting yourself on fire might land you a job.