Davos Newbies

If any readers want to subscribe to Davos Newbies in its new guise, the correct feed address is here.

Tomorrow night, Jay Rosen and I are going to get on the stage at Melbourne’s Town Hall and try to convince Melburnians that something fundamental has changed in the media world. I’m sure Jay will be far more eloquent about it than I, but if you want to read what I’m planning to say, you can find my draft here.

I’ve long argued that the Conservative party is going to need to undergo the same painful process through which Neil Kinnock, John Smith and finally Tony Blair reformed the Labour party into an electable party. Since the Tories haven’t even had their Kinnock yet, I think this is still going to take a very long time (which pleases me no end).

Tim Yeo seems to understand this. Writing in today’s Guardian, he notes:

We must recognise that elections are won only on the centre ground. This is an inherently difficult and even unwelcome message for activists whose instinct is to believe that fiercer attacks on the government and more loyal adherence to rightwing principles is the route back to power. It took Labour a decade and a half to learn that victory comes from broadening, not deepening, the party’s appeal to the electorate. If we don’t face up to the message of a vote share that’s stuck at 33%, there’s a danger it will take us much longer.

We’ll see whether the majority of his colleagues agree with him in the leadership contest that is looming. My guess is that they’ll opt for more of the same rather than radical change. I certainly can’t envision any scenario under which the Conservatives return to power in 2009. There’s some chance that Labour may find itself in coalition with the LibDems then (although I reckon that’s not likely), but there’s no way the Conservatives can achieve a parliamentary majority.

While I’ve been preoccupied with starting my new company and preparing my talks for the current trip in Australia, I’ve been remiss in pointing to essential reading.

Suzanne Nossell and her colleagues on Democracy Arsenal have only been blogging for a couple of months, but her posts in particular are the first thing I turn to when they appear in my aggregator. Today she offers her top 10 things the UN does well (her weekly top 10s are fantastic and belie the usual triteness that infect lists). Over on Daniel Drezner, where she is guest blogging, she provides the reflection: four things the UN could do better.

One of the glitches that happened in moving Davos Newbies to WordPress is some of the very earliest posts were shunted into draft status, rather than published.

I’m sure a clever PHP scripter could do something nifty to transfer them all back. But I’m doing it manually. And it has occasioned a wave of nostalgia. It’s been ages since I read the stuff I wrote in January 2000 about Davos (depending when you read this, only some of the posts are back up). In some ways, they are my version of Proust’s madeleine.

Now that I have my new weblog software sorted out, I can get back to the real business of writing.

I’m in Australia for a week for the Alfred Deakin Innovation Lectures in Melbourne. My lecture, which is paired with Jay Rosen, is on Wednesday night. So what else am I doing? On Friday, I did seminars with high school and university students, and Saturday I spoke to the Future Summit. I’m now on my way to Brisbane to do a seminar there. Great fun.

As always when I’m in Australia, one of the clearest impressions I get is of a nation wonderfully comfortable with modernity. Melbourne in particular is a city where the startlingly modern — architecture and public art — has been sensitively interwoven with its nineteenth and early twentieth century heritage. Very encouraging.

As you might have noticed, I’ve switched Davos Newbies from Manila to WordPress. It’s a work in progress, so do bear with me in case there are any glitches.

Although I’ve moved from Manila after five-and-a-half years, I still feel a huge debt to Dave Winer, who developed the software and who was the original person to encourage me (and so many others) to weblog. It now seems an utterly obvious thing to blog about creating the Davos program, but Dave saw the potential of that years before anyone else.

Dave has been a constant support for both Davos Newbies and myself. When the time came for me to move, he swiftly moved to help me with the transition. Thanks, Dave.

I can’t say moving from Manila to WordPress is the simplest thing in the world. Fortunately, Jason Levine, who wrote a clever bit of software for just this task, kindly offered to do the crucial exportation for me. We’ve never met, never corresponded before. Another great example of the continuing kindness of the blogosphere.

On Saturday, Monday and now Tuesday, I’ve written posts and published them as I have done for the last five years. Each time they appear fine, only to vanish — leaving a completely blank home page.

Anyone know what’s going wrong?